**;•> 



<»H r 






»0 ■ 






II.,- ' 

■ 

■ 




vH' 



■ *;H/;t 



■ - 







class r H i>q\ 

Book f l As 6 "* 

GoipglitW- 



COPYRIGHT DEPOStH 



MODERN 

AMERICAN AND BRITISH 

POETRY "T£3 

^7 



EDITED BY 

LOUIS UNTERMEYER 

Author of " Challenge," " The New Adam," " The New 
Era in American Poetry, " etc. 



92 



NEW YORK 

HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY 






COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY 
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC. 



PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY 

THE QUINN & BODEN COMPANY 

RAHWAY. N. J. 



APR 2! 1922 
g)C!.A659696 



^t 



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 



For permission to reprint most of the material in this 
volume, the editor wishes to thank not only the poets 
whose cooperation has been of such assistance, but also 
the publishers, all of whom are holders of the copyright. 
The indebtedness is alphabetically acknowledged to: 

Richard G. Badger — for the poem from Sun and Saddle 

Leather by Badger Clark. 
Bobbs-Merrill Company — for two poems from The Complete 

Works of James Whitcomb Riley. 
Brentano's — for the poem from Chanteys and Ballads by 

Harry Kemp. 
Nicholas L. Brown — for the poem from Blood of Things by 

Alfred Kreymborg. 
The Century Company — for the selections from Merchants 

from Cathay by William Rose Benet and War and Laughter 

by James Oppenheim. 
The Century Magazine — for "Lake Song" by Jean Starr 

Untermeyer. 
Dodd, Mead & Company — for the poem from Lyrics of Lowly 

Life and Lyrics of Love and Laughter by Paul Laurence 

Dunbar. 
George H. Doran Company — for the selections from Moons of 

Grandeur by William Rose Benet, Vigils and Candles That 

Burn by Aline Kilmer, Trees and Other Poems by Joyce 

Kilmer. 
Doubleday, Page & Company — for the selections from The 

Man with the Hoe and Lincoln and Other Poems by Edwin 

Markham. Thanks also are due Mr. Rudyard Kipling as 

well as A. P. Watt and Son for "The Return" from The 

Five Nations and "An Astrologer's Song" from Rewards 

and Fairies by Rudyard Kipling. 
E. P. Dutton & Company— for the selections from The Vale of 

iii 



iv Acknowledgments 

Tempe by Madison Cawein, and the poems from The Old 
Huntsman, Counter- Attack and Picture Show by Siegfried 
Sassoon. 

Four Seas Company — for the quotations from The Charnel Rose 
and The House of Dust by Conrad Aiken, for the poem from 
War and Love by Richard Aldington. 

Harcourt, Brace & Company — for the selections from A Mis- 
cellany of American Poetry — 1920; Canzoni and Carmina by 
T. A. Daly, Smoke and Steel by Carl Sandburg, Challenge 
and The New Adam by Louis Untermeyer, Cross Currents 
by Margaret Widdemer, Nets to Catch the Wind by 
Elinor Wylie, The Contemplative Quarry by Anna Wickham. 

Harper & Brothers — for the selection from Fables for the 
Frivolous by Guy Wetmore Carryl. 

Harr Wagner Publishing Co. — for the selections from The 
Complete Poetical Works of Joaquin Miller. 

Henry Holt & Company — for the selections from Wilderness 
Songs by Grace Hazard Conkling, Peacock Pie and The 
Listeners by Walter de la Mare, A Boy's Will, North of 
Boston, and Mountain Interval by Robert Frost, Chicago 
Poems and Cornhuskers by Carl Sandburg, Poems by Edward 
Thomas, These Times by Louis Untermeyer, and Factories by 
Margaret Widdemer. 

The selections from The Complete Poems of Thomas Bailey 
Aldrich, The Complete Works of Bret Harte, The Shoes 
That Danced by Anna Hempstead Branch, Davy and the 
Goblin by Charles E. Carryl, Grimm Tales Made Gay by 
Guy Wetmore Carryl, Poems 1908-1919 by John Drinkwater, 
Riders of the Stars and Songs of the Trail by Harry Herbert 
Knibbs, Poems and Poetic Dramas by William Vaughn 
Moody, Lyrics of Joy by Frank Dempster Sherman, Poems 
by Edward Rowland Sill, Sea Garden by "H. D.," and the 
quotations from Some Imagist Poets — 1916 and Some Imagist 
Poets — 1917 are used by permission of, and by special arrange- 
ment with Houghton Mifflin Company, the authorized pub- 
lishers. 

B. W. Huebsch — for the selections from Poems by Wilfred 
Owen, Amores and New Poems by D. H. Lawrence, 
The Ghetto and Sun-Up by Lola Ridge, Optimos by Horace 
Traubel, Growing Pains and Dreams out of Darkness by 
Jean Starr Untermeyer. 



Acknowledgments v 

Alfred A. Knopf — for the selections from A Canticle of Pan 
by Witter Bynner, Collected Poems by W. H. Davies, Fairies 
and Fusiliers and Country Sentiment by Robert Graves, 
Poems: First Series by J. C. Squire, Colors of Life by Max 
Eastman, Asphalt and Other Poems by Orrick Johns, Mush- 
rooms by Alfred Kreymborg, Songs for the New Age, by 
James Oppenheim, Lustra by Ezra Pound, Profiles from China 
by Eunice Tietjens. 

John Lane Company — for the selections from Poems by G. K. 
Chesterton, Ballads and Songs by John Davidson, The Col- 
lected Poems of Rupert Brooke, Admirals All by Henry New- 
bolt, Lyrics and Dramas by Stephen Phillips, The Hope of 
the World and Other Poems by William Watson. 

Little, Brown & Company — for the selections from Poems and 
Poems — Third Series by Emily Dickinson. 

The Macmillan Company — for the selections from The Congo 
and Other Poems and The Chinese Nightingale by Vachel 
Lindsay, Sword Blades and Poppy Seed and Pictures of the 
Floating World by Amy Lowell, Spoon River Anthology by 
Edgar Lee Masters, The Quest by John G. Neihardt, The 
Man Against the Sky by Edwin Arlington Robinson, Love 
Songs and Flame and Shadow by Sara Teasdale, Fires and 
Borderlands by W. W. Gibson, Poems by Ralph Hodgson, 
Good Friday and Other Poems and the passage from "Dauber" 
in The Story of A Round-House by John Masefield. 

The Manas Press — for the selections from Verse by Adelaide 
Crapsey. 

Thomas B. Mosher — for the selections from A Quiet Road and 
A Wayside Lute by Lizette Woodworth Reese. 

The New Republic — for the poem by Ridgeley Torrence. 

Pagan Publishing Company — for two poems from Minna and 
Myself by Maxwell Bodenheim. 

The Poetry Bookshop (England) — for the excerpts from 
Strange Meetings and Children of Love by Harold Monro, 
The Farmer's Bride by Charlotte Mew and the poems re- 
printed from the biennial anthologies, Georgian Poetry. 

G. P. Putman's Sons — for the title-poem from In Flanders 
Fields by John McCrae. 

A. M. Robertson — for the sonnet from The House of Orchids 
by George Sterling. 

Charles Scribner's Sons — for the selections from Poems by 



vi Acknowledgments 

Henry Cuyler Bunner, Poems by Eugene Field, Poems by 
William Ernest Henley, Poems of Sidney Lanier, The 
Children of the Night and The Town Down the River by 
Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Poems by Alan Seeger. 

Frank Shay — for the quotation from Figs from Thistles by 
Edna St. Vincent Millay. 

Sherman, French & Company — for the two poems from The 
Human Fantasy and Love and Liberation, by John Hall 
Wheelock. 

Small, Maynard & Company — for the selections from Ballads 
of Lost Haven by Bliss Carman, Along the Trail by Richard 
Hovey, Songs from Vagabondia and More Songs from Vaga- 
bondia by Richard Hovey and Bliss Carman. 

F. A. Stokes Company — for the selections from War Is Kind 
by Stephen Crane, Grenstone Poems by Witter Bynner, and 
Poems by a Little Girl by Hilda Conkling. 

Sturgis & Walton Company — for the poem from Monday 
Morning by James Oppenheim. 

The Yale Review— for "The Onset" by Robert Frost and "Two 
Songs for Solitude" by Sara Teasdale. 

The Yale University Press — for selections from Young Ad- 
venture by Stephen Vincent Benet and The Burglar of the 
Zodiac by William Rose Benet. 



A FOREWORD 

"Modern" is, perhaps, the most misleading adjective 
in the dictionary. There is no term in any language 
that is more fluctuant and elusive, that shifts its meanings 
with greater rapidity, that turns its back so quickly upon 
those ardent champions who defended it most stubbornly. 
The present merges so swiftly into the past that today's 
definition of modernity may seem, after the shortest of 
intervals, an impertinent apology for some safely en- 
shrined classicism. Numberless critics have been haunted 
by the knowledge that the outrageous heresy of to-day 
is often the orthodox dogma of to-morrow. 

And yet, though one should not use hard and fast 
rules when measuring so fluid a thing as time, one must 
at least be arbitrary about the years when making an 
anthology. A "modern" compilation is no exception. 
Although it is difficult to draw a line between periods of 
literary activity — and particularly of poetry — the task 
is made somewhat easier by the advent of Walt Whitman 
in America and the close of the Victorian Era in Eng- 
land. It would have been pleasant to divide the poetry 
of this dual collection into groups and distinct tendencies. 
Unfortunately, such a scheme would give the reader a 
series of impressions that would be contradictory and, in 
the final effect, false. One should not attempt to ticket 
contemporary writers (on whom the chief emphasis is 
placed in this volume) with conclusive labels, especially 
since so many of the writers are still developing. One 
cannot give a true picture of a period in the state of flux 

vii 



viii A Foreword 

except by showing its fluid character. It has been the 
editor's aim to reflect this very flux and diversity. 

Since the chronological arrangement is, in spite of cer- 
tain disadvantages, the only logical one, an arbitrary 
boundary has been fixed. Conceiving modern British 
poetry to begin after the fertile Tennyson-Browning- 
Rossetti-Swinburne epoch, the year 1840 is made to 
act as dividing-line; any poet born before that date is 
ruthlessly excluded. In the case of American poetry, 
the line has been moved back ten years. Thus, by includ- 
ing work of poets born in this country as early as 1830, 
a richer background has been given the poetry of our 
times; and, although some of the interval poets like Aid- 
rich and Lanier could scarcely be considered "modern," 
it is curious to see how wide and how completely the 
circle has swung since Walt Whitman startled the world 
with Leaves of Grass. The first part of this collection 
might well be called, "American Poetry since Whitman" 
for the poet who has often been called the godfather of 
the new generation ended one period and began another. 

It is a happy circumstance that this volume should 
begin with the poetry of Emily Dickinson (born 1 830) 
whose work, printed for the first time after her death, 
was unknown as late as 1890 and unnoticed until several 
years later. For hers was a forerunner of the new spirit 
— free in expression, unhampered in choice of subject, 
keen in psychology — to which a countryful of writers 
has responded. No longer confined to London, Boston 
or New York as literary centers, the impulse to create 
is everywhere. There is scarcely a state, barely a town- 
ship that has not produced its local laureate. 

The notes preceding the poems are intended to support 
and amplify this geographical as well as biographical 
range. It is instructive as well as interesting to see what 



A Foreword ix 

effect, if any, climate and conditions exert on the creator's 
expression: how much the gaunt and quiet hills of New 
Hampshire manifest themselves in the New England 
soliloquies of Robert Frost or how the noisy energy of 
the Middle West booms and rattles through the high- 
pitched syllables of Vachel Lindsay. The notes, with their 
brief critical as well as bibliographical data, have also been 
prepared on the theory that poet and person have a defi- 
nite relation to each other and the enjoyment of the one 
is enhanced by an acquaintance with the other. 

While emphasis has avowedly been placed upon the con- 
tribution of living writers, practically no stress has been 
laid upon the controversial subject of Form. Teachers no 
less than students are intent upon discovering the kernel 
rather than analyzing the shell that covers it. It is the 
matter which concerns us, not the manner. J'ers libre, 
that bugaboo of many of our otherwise liberal critics, 
has produced an incalculable quantity of trivial and tire- 
some exhibitions. But so, the vers librists might reply, 
has the sonnet. Any form, in the hands of the genuine 
artist, not only justifies but dignifies itself. Free verse 
(a misnomer, by the bye, for free verse instead of being 
"free" obeys certain well-known though flexible laws 
of rhythm, balance, return and cadence) is capable of 
many exquisite and unique effects impossible of achieve- 
ment in a strict, metrical pattern. Nor is free verse as 
one-dimensional or as much of a piece as is often charged. 
Its variety is as great as its exponents. It can be as 
vigorous as the unrhymed "voluntaries" of Henley or 
as delicately chiselled as the frail but firm precision of 
H. D.'s imagiste lines. We find it in various tones and 
textures: rough-hewn and massive as in the iron solidity 
of Carl Sandburg, brilliantly glazed and riotously color- 
ful as in the enamelled pictures of Amy Lowell, restrained 



x A Foreword 

and biblical as in the sonorous strophes of James Oppen- 
heim. But though vers libre has been the subject of 
much curious debate, it is only one feature of the surface 
resemblances as well as the wide differences of modern 
poets on both sides of the Atlantic. A sweeping inclusive- 
ness distinguishes their dissimilar verse; it embraces all 
themes, irrespective of technique; it employs old forms 
and new departures with impartiality and equal skill. 

There is this outstanding difference between latter-day 
American and British poets. Broadly speaking, modern 
British verse is smoother, more matured and, molded by 
centuries of literature, richer in associations and surer 
in artistry. American poetry, no longer imitative and 
colonial, is sharper, more vigorously experimental; pro- 
vocative with youth and youth's occasional — and natural 
— crudities. Where the English product is formulated, 
precise and (in spite of a few fluctuations) true to its 
past, the American expression is far more varied and, 
being the reflection of partly indigenous, partly naturalized 
and largely unassimilated ideas, temperaments and races, 
is characteristically uncoordinated. English poetry may 
be compared to a broad and luxuriating river with a series 
of tributaries contributing to the now thinning, now 
widening channel. American poetry might be described 
as a sudden rush of unconnected mountain torrents, valley 
streams and city sluices; instead of one placidly moving 
body, there are a dozen rushing currents. It is as if 
here, in the last fifteen years, submerged springs had 
burst through stubborn ground. 

For this reason, I have included in both sections, not 
only the often quoted poems by those poets who are 
accepted everywhere as outstanding figures, but examples 
of lesser known singers who are also representative of 
their age. The same spirit has impelled me to reprint a 



A Foreword xi 

liberal portion of that species which stands midway be- 
tween light verse and authentic poetry. The Eugene 
Fields, the J. W. Rileys, the Anthony Deanes may not 
occupy the same high plane as the Masefields and Frosts, 
but there is scarcely a person that will not be attracted 
to them and thus be drawn on to deeper notes and larger 
themes. In the dialect verses of Irwin Russell, Paul 
Laurence Dunbar and T. A. Daly there is dignity be- 
neath the humor; their very broken syllables reveal how 
America has become a melting-pot in a poetic as well as 
an ethnic sense. 

With the realization that this gathering is not so much 
a complete summary as an introduction to modern poetry, 
it is hoped that the collection, in spite of its obvious 
limitations, w^ill move the young reader to a closer in- 
spection of the poets here included. The purpose of 
such an anthology must always be to rouse and stimulate 
an interest rather than to satisfy a curiosity. Such, at 
least, is the hope and aim of one editor. 

L. U. 

January, 1922. 
New York City. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

A Foreword vii 

MODERN AMERICAN POETRY 

Preface 3 

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) 

Chartless 26 

Indian Summer 26 

Suspense 27 

A Cemetery 27 

Beclouded 27 

Pedigree 28 

Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836- 1907) 

Memory 29 

"Enamored Architect of Airy Rhyme" . . 29 

John Hay (1838-1905) 

Jim Bludso 30 

Bret Harte (1839-1902) 

"Jim" ........ 33 

Plain Language from Truthful James . . 35 

Joaquin Miller (1841-1913) 

From "Byron" 38 

Columbus 38 

Edward Rowland Sill (1841-1887) 

Opportunity 40 

Sidney Lanier (1842-1881) 

Song of the Chattahoochee . . . . 41 
Charles Edw t ard Carryl (1842-1920) 

Robinson Crusoe's Story 43 

xiii 



xiv Contents 



PAGE 



James Whitcomb Riley (1849-1916) 

"When the Frost is on the Punkin" . 46 

A Parting Guest 48 

Eugene Field (1850-1895) 

Little Boy Blue . . . . . . .49 

Seein' Things 50 

Edwin Markham (1852- ) 

The Man with the Hoe 52 

Preparedness 54 

Lincoln, The Man of the People ... 54 

Irwin Russell (1853-1879) 

De Fust Banjo 56 

Lizette Woodworth Reese (1856- ) 

Tears . . . . . . . .59 

Spicewood . . 60 

Frank Dempster Sherman (1860-1917) 

At Midnight 61 

Bacchus 61 

Louise Imogen Guiney (1861-1920) 

The Wild Ride 62 

Bliss Carman (1861- ) 

A Vagabond Song . ... . . 64 

Hem and Haw . . . . . . .65 

Daisies 66 

Richard Burton (1861- ) 

Black Sheep . . . . . . .66 

Richard Hovey (1864-1900) 

At the Crossroads 68 

Unmanifest Destiny . . • * . . 70 

A Stein Song 71 

Madison Cawein (1865-1914) 

Snow 7 2 

Deserted . . 73 

William Vaughn Moody (1869-1910) 

On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines , . 74 



Contents XV 



PAGE 



George Sterling (1869- ) 

The Black Vulture 75 

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869- ) 

Miniver Cheevy 77 

The Master 78 

An Old Story 80 

The Dark Hills 81 

Richard Cory 81 

Edgar Lee Masters (1869- ) 

Petit, the Poet 83 

Lucinda Matlock 83 

Anne Rutledge 84 

Stephen Crane (1871-1900) 

I Saw a Man 85 

The Wayfarer . 86 

The Blades of Grass 86 

T. A. Daly (1871- ^ ) 

The Song of the Thrush 87 

Mia Carlotta 88 

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) 

The Turning of the Babies in the Bed . . 90 

A Coquette Conquered 91 

Guy Wetmore Carryl (1873-1904) 

The Sycophantic Fox and the Gullible Raven 93 
How Jack Found that Beans May Go Back 

on a Chap 94 

H. H. Knibbs (1874- ) 

The Valley that God Forgot .... 97 

Anna Hempstead Branch 

The Monk in the Kitchen .... 99 

Amy Lowell (1874- ) 

Solitaire 104 

Meeting-House Hill 105 

Wind and Silver 106 

A Lady 106 

A Decade 107 



XVI 



Contents 



) 



RlDGELY TORRENCE (1875- ) 

The Bird and the Tree . 
Robert Frost ( 1875- ) 
Mending Wall . 
The Tuft of Flowers 
Blue-Butterfly Day . 
Birches .... 

The Onset .... 
Carl Sandburg (1878- 
Grass 

Prayers of Steel .... 
Cool Tombs .... 

Fog 

From "Smoke and Steel" . 
Adelaide Crapsey (1878-1914) 
Three Cinquains: 
November Night . 

Triad 

The Warning 
On Seeing Weather-Beaten Trees 
Grace Hazard Conkling (1878- 
Frost on a Window . . . 
Vachel Lindsay (1879- ) 

The Eagle that is Forgotten . 
To a Golden Haired Girl in a 

Town 
The Traveler 
The Congo . 

John G. Neihardt (1881 

Cry of the People 

Let Me Live Out My Years 
Witter Bynner (1881- ) 

Grass-Tops 

Voices .... 

A Farmer Remembers Lincoln 



) 



Lou 



lsiana 



107 

in 
112 
114 
114 
116 

118 
119 
119 
120 
120 



123 
123 
123 
123 

124 

126 

127 
128 
128 

136 
137 

138 
138 
139 



Contents xvn 

PAGE 

James Oppenheim (1882- ) 

The Slave . . 141 

The Runner in the Skies 141 

The Lincoln Child 142 

Lola Ridge 

Passages from "The Ghetto" .... 146 

Alfred Kreymborg (1883- ) 

Old Manuscript 148 

Dawns 148 

Badger Clark (1883- ) 

The Glory Trail 149 

Harry Kemp (1883- ) 

Street Lamps 152 

A Phantasy of Heaven 153 

Max Eastman (1883- ) 

At the Aquarium 154 

Eunice Tietjens (1884- ) 

The Most-Sacred Mountain . . . .155 

Sara Teasdale (1884- ) 

Spring Night 157 

Night Song at Amalfi 158 

Water Lilies 158 

Two Songs for Solitude: 

The Crystal Gazer 159 

The Solitary 159 

Ezra Pound ( 1885- ) 

A Virginal 160 

Ballad for Gloom 161 

In a Station of the Metro . . . .162 

Louis Untermeyer (1885- ) 

Caliban in the Coal Mines .... 163 

Summons 164 

On the Birth of a Child 165 

Prayer 166 



xviii Contents 



PAGE 



Jean Starr Untermeyer (1886- ) 

High Tide . . 168 

Autumn 168 

Lake Song 170 

John Gould Fletcher (1886- ) 

London Nightfall 171 

From "Irradiations" 172 

Lincoln 172 

The Skaters 175 

"H. D." (1886- ) 

Oread ■ . 176 

Heat 177 

Pear Tree ........ 177 

William Rose Benet (1886- ) 

Merchants from Cathay 179 

How to Catch Unicorns 182 

John Hall Wheelock (1886- ) 

Sunday Evening in the Common . . .183 

Love and Liberation 184 

Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918) 

Trees 185 

Martin . 186 

Orrick Johns (1887- ) 

The Interpreter 187 

Alan Seeger (1888-1916) 

"I Have a Rendezvous with Death" . .188 

Margaret Widdemer 

Factories 190 

The Watcher . . . . . . .191 

Aline Kilmer (1888- ) 

Experience . . . . . . . .192 

Things 192 

Elinor Wylie 

The Eagle and the Mole 194 

Sea Lullaby 195 



Contents xix 



PAGE 



Coxrad Aiken (1889- ) 

Miracles 196 

Portrait of a Girl . 197 

Morning Song from "Senlin" .... 198 

Maxwell Bodenheim (1892- ) 

Poet to his Love 201 

Old Age 201 

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892- ) 

God's World 203 

Renascence 203 

The Pear Tree 209 

Stephen Vincent Benet (1898- ) 

Portrait of a Boy 210 

Leonie Adams (1899- ) 

April Mortality 21 1 

Home-Coming 212 

Hilda Conkling (1910- ) 

Water . 213 

Hay-Cock 214 

I Keep Wondering 214 

MODERN BRITISH POETRY 

Preface 217 

Austin Dobson (i 840-1 921) 

In After Days 227 

Before Sedan 228 

Wilfred Scawen Blunt (1840- ) 

Laughter and Death 230 

Thomas Hardy (1840 ) 

In Time of "The Breaking of Nations" . .231 

The Darkling Thrush 231 

Andrew Lang (1844- ) 

Scythe Song 233 

Robert Bridges (1844- ) 

Winter Nightfall 234 



xx Contents 



PAGE 



Arthur O'Shaughnessy (1844-1881) 

Ode 235 

Alice Meynell (1848- ) 

The Shepherdess 236 

William Ernest Henley (1849-1903) 

Invictus 237 

The Blackbird 238 

Margaritae Sorori 238 

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) 

Romance „ 240 

Requiem 240 

Fiona Macleod {William Sharp) (1855-1905) 

The Valley of Silence 241 

Oscar Wilde (1856-1900) 

Requiescat 242 

John Davidson (1857-1909) 

Imagination 243 

William Watson (1858- ) 

Song 245 

Estrangement 245 

Francis Thompson (1859-1907) 

Daisy . . . 246 

To a Snowflake . . . . . . . 248 

A. E. Housman (1859- ) 

Reveille 249 

When I Was One-and-Twenty . . . 250 
To an Athlete Dying Young . . . .251 

Katharine Tynan Hinkson (1861- ) 

Sheep and Lambs . . . . ' . . 252 

Henry Newbolt (1862- ) 

Drake's Drum 253 

Arthur Symons (1865- ) 

In the Wood of Finvara 255 

The Crying of Water 255 



Contents xxi 



PAGE 



William Butler Yeats (1865- ) 

The Lake Isle of Innisfree .... 256 
The Song of the Old Mother . . . .257 

An Old Song 257 

When You Are Old 258 

Rudyard Kipling (1865- ) 

Gunga Din 259 

The Return 262 

An Astrologer's Song 264 

Recessional 267 

Lionel Johnson (1867-1902) 

Mystic and Cavalier 269 

Ernest Dowson (1867-1900) 

To One in Bedlam 270 

"jE" (George William Russell) (1867- ) 

Continuity 271 

The Unknown God 272 

Stephen Phillips (1868-1915) 

Fragment from "Herod" 272 

A Dream 273 

Laurence Bin yon (1869- ) 

A Song 274 

The Unseen Flower 274 

Anthony C. Deane (1870- ) 

The Ballad of the Billycock .... 275 

William H. Davies (1870- ) 

Days Too Short 277 

The Moon 278 

The Example 278 

A Greeting 279 

J. M. Synge (1871-1909) 

Prelude 280 

A Translation from Petrarch . . . .281 

Beg-Innish 281 



xxii Contents 



PAGE 



Eva Gore-Booth (1871- ) 

The Waves of Breffny 282 

Moira O'Neill 

A Broken Song 283 

Ralph Hodgson (1871- ) 

The Birdcatcher 284 

Time, You Old Gipsy Man .... 285 

After 286 

The Mystery 286 

John McCrae (1872-1918) 

In Flanders Fields 287 

Walter De la Mare (1873- ) 

The Listeners 288 

Old Susan 289 

Silver 290 

Nod 291 

G. K. Chesterton (1874- ) 

Lepanto 293 

The Donkey 298 

John Masefield (1874- ) 

A Consecration 299 

Sea-Fever . . . . . . . .301 

Rounding the Horn . . . . . 301 

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson (1878- ) 

The Stone 304 

Sight 307 

Edward Thomas (1878-1917) 

If I Should Ever By Chance .... 308 

Tall Nettles 309 

Cock-Crow 309 

SeUMAS O'SuLLIVAN (1879- ) 

Praise 310 

Charlotte Mew 

Beside the Bed 31 1 

Sea Love 311 



Contents xxiii 

PAGE 

Harold Monro (1879- ) 

Every Thing 312 

The Nightingale Near the House . . .315 

Alfred Noyes (1880 ) 

The Barrel-Organ 316 

Epilogue 322 

Padraic Colum (1881- ) 

The Plougher 323 

Joseph Campbell (1881- ) 

The Old Woman 325 

Lascelles Abercrombie (1881- ) 

From "Vashti" . . . . ' . . .326 

James Stephens (1882- ) 

The Shell 327 

What Tomas An Buile Said In a Pub . . 328 

John Drinkwater (1882- ) 

Reciprocity 329 

A Town Window 330 

J. C. Squire (1883- ) 

A House 331 

Anna Wickham (1883- ) 

Envoi 333 

Domestic Economy 333 

The Singer 333 

James Elroy Flecker (1884-1915) 

Stillness 334 

D. H. Lawrence (1885- ) 

Piano 335 

Forsaken and Forlorn 336 

John Freeman (1885- ) 

Stone Trees 336 

Shane Leslie (1885- ) 

Fleet Street 338 



xxiv Contents 



PAGE 



Siegfried Sassoon (1886- ) 

Dreamers 339 

The Rear-Guard 340 

Aftermath . . . . . . . .341 

Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) 

Sonnet 343 

The Great Lover 343 

The Soldier 346 

Joseph Plunkett (1887-1916) 

I See His Blood Upon the Rose . . . 347 

F. W. Harvey 

The Bugler 347 

T. P. Cameron Wilson (1889-1918) 

Sportsmen in Paradise 348 

W. J. Turner (1889- ) 

Romance 349 

Francis Led widge (1891-1917) 

An Evening in England .... . 351 
Irene Rutherford McLeod (1891- ) 

Lone Dog .351 

Richard Aldington (1892- ) 

Images . . . ... . . 352 

Robert Nichols (1893- ) 

Nearer 354 

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) 

Apologia Pro Poemate Meo . . . .355 
Anthem for Doomed Youth . . . . 357 

C. H. SORLEY (1895-I915) 

Two Sonnets 358 

To Germany 359 

Robert Graves (1895- ) 

It's a Queer Time 360 

Neglectful Edward 361 

I Wonder What It Feels Like to be Drowned ? 362 



Contents xxv 



PAGE 



Louis Golding (1895- ) 

Ploughman at the Plough 363 

The Singer of High State . 364 

A Reference Bibliography 367 

Index of Authors 369 



MODERN AMERICAN POETRY 



PREFACE 

THE CIVIL WAR AND AFTER 

The end of the Civil War marked the end of a 
literary epoch. The New England group, containing (if 
Poe could be added) all the great names of the ante- 
bellum period, began to disintegrate. The poets had 
outsung themselves ; it was a time of surrender and swan- 
songs. Unable to respond to the new forces of political 
nationalism and industrial reconstruction, the Brahmins 
(that famous group of intellectuals who dominated lit- 
erary America) withdrew into their libraries. Poets like 
Longfellow, Bryant, Taylor, turned their eyes away from 
the native scene, rhapsodized endlessly about Europe, or 
left creative writing altogether and occupied themselves 
with translations. "They had been borne into an era in 
which they had no part," writes Fred Lewis Pattee (A 
History of American Literature Since i8jo), "and they 
contented themselves with reechoings of the old music." 

Suddenly the break came. America developed a na- 
tional consciousness ; the West discovered itself, and the 
East discovered the West. Grudgingly at first, the aris- 
tocratic leaders made way for a new expression; crude, 
jangling, vigorously democratic. The old order was 
changing with a vengeance. All the preceding writers 
— poets like Emerson, Thoreau, Lowell, Longfellow, 
Holmes — were not only products of the New England 
colleges, but typically "Boston gentlemen of the early 
Renaissance." To them, the new men must have seemed 
like a regiment recruited from the ranks of vulgarity. 

3 



4 Preface 

Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, John Hay, 
Joaquin Miller, Joel Chandler Harris, James Whitcomb 
Riley — these were men who had graduated from the 
farm, the frontier, the mine, the pilot-house, the printer's 
shop! For a while, the movement seemed of little con- 
sequence ; the impact of Whitman and the Westerners 
was averted. The poets of the transition, with a delib- 
erate art, ignored the surge of a spontaneous national 
expression. They were even successful in holding it back. 
But it was gathering force. 

THE "POST-MORTEM" PERIOD 

The nineteenth century, up to its last quarter, had 
been a period of new vistas and revolts: a period of pro- 
test and iconoclasm — the era of Shelley and Byron, the 
prophets of "liberty, equality and fraternity." It left 
no immediate heirs. In England, its successors by de- 
fault were the lesser Victorians. In America, the inten- 
sity and power of men like Emerson and Whittier gave 
way to the pale romanticism and polite banter of the 
transition or, what might even more fittingly be called, 
the "post-mortem" poets. For these interim lyrists were 
frankly the singers of reaction, reminiscently digging 
among the bones of a long-dead past. They burrowed 
and borrowed, half archaeologists, half artisans; impelled 
not so much by the need of creating poetry as the desire 
to write it. 

From 1866 to 1880 the United States was in a chaotic 
and frankly materialistic condition ; it was full of political 
scandals, panics, frauds. The moral fiber was flabby ; the 
country was apathetic, corrupt and contented. As in all 
such periods of national unconcern, the artists turned 
from life altogether, preoccupying themselves with the 
by-products of art: with method and technique, with 



Preface 5 

elaborate and artificial conceits, with facile ideas rather 
than fundamental ideals. Bayard Taylor, Richard Henry 
Stoddard, Paul Hamilton Hayne, Thomas Bailey Aldrich 
— all of these authors, in an effort to escape a reality they 
could not express and did not even wish to understand, 
fled to a more congenial realm of fantasy. They took 
the easiest routes to a prim and academic Arcadia, to a 
cloying and devitalized Orient or a mildly sensuous and 
treacle-dripping Greece. In their desperate preoccupa- 
tion with lures and legends overseas, they were not, except 
for the accident of birth, American at all; all of them 
owed much more to old England than to New England. 

WALT WHITMAN 

Whitman, who was to influence future generations so 
profoundly in Europe as well as in America, had already 
appeared. The third edition of that stupendous volume, 
Leaves of Grass, had been printed in i860. Almost im- 
mediately after, the publisher failed and the book passed 
out of public notice. But Whitman, broken in health 
and cheated by his exploiters, lived to see not only a 
seventh edition of his great work published in 1881, but 
a complete collection printed in his seventy-third year 
(1892) in which the twelve poems of the experimental 
first edition had grown to nearly four hundred. 

The influence of Whitman can scarcely be over- 
estimated. It has touched every shore of letters, quick- 
ened every current of art. Whitman has been acclaimed 
by a great and growing public, not only here but in Eng- 
land, Germany, Italy and France. He has been hailed as 
prophet, as pioneer, as rebel, as the fiery humanist and, 
most frequently, as liberator. In spite of the rhetorical 
flourish, he may well be called the Lincoln of our litera- 
ture. The whole scheme of Leaves of Grass is inclusive 



6 Preface 

rather than exclusive; its form is elemental, dynamic, 
free. 

Nor was it only in the relatively minor matter of form 
that Whitman became our great poetic emancipator. He 
led the way toward a wider aspect of democracy ; he took 
his readers out of fusty, lamp-lit libraries into the sharp 
sunlight and the buoyant air. He was, as Burroughs 
wrote, preeminently the poet of vista; his work had the 
power "to open doors and windows, to let down bars 
rather than to put them up, to dissolve forms, to escape 
narrow boundaries, to plant the reader on a hill rather 
than in a corner." He could do this because, first of all, 
be believed implicitly in life — in its physical as well as 
its spiritual manifestations; he sought to grasp existence 
as a whole, not rejecting the things that, to other minds, 
had seemed trivial or tawdry. The cosmic and the com- 
monplace were synonymous to him; he declared he was 
part of the most elemental, primitive things and con- 
stantly identified himself with them. 

It was this breadth, this jubilant acceptance that made 
Whitman so keen a lover of casual and ordinary things; 
he was the first of our poets to reveal "the glory of the 
commonplace." He transmuted, by the intensity of his 
emotion, material which had been hitherto regarded as 
too unpoetic for poetry. His long poem "Song of My- 
self" is an excellent example. Here his "barbaric 
yawp," sounded "over the roofs of the world," is 
softened, time and again, to express a lyric ecstasy and 
naif wonder. 

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the 

stars, 
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and 

the egg of the wren, 
And the tree-toad is a chef-d'oeuvre of the highest, 



Preface 7 

And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven, 
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery, 
And the cow, crunching with depressed head, surpasses any 

statue, 
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels! 

It is this large naturalism, this affection for all that 
is homely and of the soil, that sets Whitman apart from 
his fellow craftsmen as our first American poet. This 
blend of familiarity and grandeur animates all his work. 
It swings with the tremendous vigor through "Crossing 
Brooklyn Ferry"; it sharpens the sturdy rhythms (and 
occasional rhymes) of the "Song of the Broad-Axe" ; it 
beats sonorously through "Drum-Taps"; it whispers im- 
mortally through the "Memories of President Lincoln" 
(particularly that magnificent threnody "When Lilacs 
Last in the Dooryard Bloomed") and lifts with a 
biblical solemnity in his most famous "Out of the Cradle 
Endlessly Rocking." 

Whitman did not scorn the past; no one was quicker 
than he to see its wealth and glories. But most of the 
older formulas belonged to their own era; they were 
foreign to our country. What was original with many 
transatlantic poets was being merely aped by facile and 
unoriginal bards in these states; concerned only with the 
myths of other and older countries, they were blind to 
the living legends of their own. In his "Song of the 
Exposition" Whitman not only wrote his own credo, he 
uttered the manifesto of the new generation — especially 
in such lines: 



Come Muse, migrate from Greece and Ionia. 
Cross out, please, those immensely overpaid accounts; 
That matter of Troy and Achilles' wrath, and Aeneas*, 
Odysseus' wanderings; 



8 '•• Preface 

Placard "Removefl£! and "To Let" on the rocks of your snowy 

Parnassus. . . '*. 
For know that a better, fresher, busier sphere, a wider, untried 

domain awaits, demands you. 



THE AWAKENING OF THE WEST 

By 1870 the public had been surfeited with sugared 
conceits and fine-spun delicacies. For almost twelve years, 
Whitman had stormed at the affectations of the period 
but comparatively few had listened. Yet an instinctive 
distaste for the prevailing superficialities had been grow- 
ing, and when the West began to express itself in the 
raw accents of Mark Twain and Bret Harte, the people 
turned to the new men with enthusiasm and relief. Mark 
Twain, a prose Whitman, revealed the romantic Missis- 
sippi and the vast Mid-West; Bret Harte, beginning a 
new American fiction in 1868, ushered in the wild humor 
and wilder poetry of California. It is still a question 
whether Bret Harte or John Hay first discovered the 
literary importance of Pike County narratives. Twain 
was positive that Hay was the pioneer; documentary 
evidence points to Harte. But it is indisputable that 
Harte developed — and even overdeveloped — the pos- 
sibilities of his backgrounds, whereas Hay after a few 
brilliant ballads, reverted to his early poetic ideals and 
turned to the production of studied, polished and undis- 
tinguished verse. 

To the loose swagger of the West, two other men 
added their diverse contributions. Edward Rowland 
Sill, cut short just as his work was gaining headway and 
strength, brought to it a gentle radicalism, a calm and 
cultured honesty; Joaquin Miller, rushing to the other 
extreme, theatricalized and exaggerated all he touched. 
He shouted platitudes at the top of his voice; his lines 



Preface 

boomed with the pomposity of a brass band; floods, fires, 
hurricanes, extravagantly blazing sunsets, Amazonian 
women, the thunder of a herd of buffaloes — all were un- 
mercifully piled on. And yet, even in its most blatant 
fortissimoSj Miller's poetry occasionally captured the 
lavish grandeur of his surroundings, the splendor of the 
Sierras, the surge and spirit of the Western world. 

Now that the leadership of letters had passed from 
the East, all parts of the country began to try their 
voices. The West continued to hold its tuneful su- 
premacy; the tradition of Harte and Hay was followed 
(softened and sentimentalized) by Eugene Field and 
James Whitcomb Riley. In the South, Irwin Russell 
was pioneering in negro dialect (1875) and Sidney 
Lanier fashioned his intricate harmonies (1879). A few 
years later (in 1888) Irwin Russell brought out his 
faithfully rendered Dialect Poems and the first phase of 
the American renascence had passed. 

REACTION AND REVOLT IN THE ^OS 

The reaction set in at the beginning of the last decade 
of the nineteenth century. The passionate urge had 
spent itself, and in its place there remained nothing but 
that minor form of art which concerns itself less with 
creation than with re-creation. These re-creators wrote 
verse that was precise, scholarly and patently reproduc- 
tive of their predecessors. "In 1890," writes Percy H. 
Boynton, "the poetry-reading w r orld was chiefly conscious 
of the passing of its leading singers for the last half- 
century." The poetry of this period (whether it is the 
hard, chiseled verse of John B. Tabb or the ornate 
delicacy of Richard Watson Gilder) breathes a kind of 
dying resignation. But those who regarded poetry chiefly 
as a not too energetic indoor-exercise were not to rule 



io Preface 

unchallenged. Restlessness was in the air and revolt 
openly declared itself with the publication of Songs from 
Vagabondia (1894), More Songs from Vagabondia 
(1896) and Last Songs from Vagabondia (1900). No 
one could have been more surprised at the tremendous 
popularity of these care-free celebrations (the first of 
the three collections went through seven rapid editions) 
than the young authors, Richard Hovey and Bliss Car- 
man. In the very first poem, Hovey voices their mani- 
festo : 

Off with the fetters 
That chafe and restrain! 
Off with the chain! 
Here Art and Letters, 
Music and Wine 
And Myrtle and Wanda, 
The winsome witches, 
Blithely combine. 
Here is Golconda, 
Here are the Indies, 
Here we are free — 
Free as the wind is, 
Free as the sea, 
Free ! 

The new insurgence triumphed. It was the heartiness, 
the gypsy jollity, the rush of high spirits that conquered. 
Readers of the Vagabondia books were captivated, though 
they were swept along by the speed of this poetry rather 
than by its philosophy. 

The enthusiastic acceptance of these new apostles of 
outdoor vigor was, however, not as much of an accident 
as it seemed. On one side, the world of art, the public 
was wearied by barren philosophizing set to tinkling 
music; on the other, the world of action, it was faced 
by a staggering growth of materialism which it feared. 



Preface 1 1 

Hovey, Carman and their imitators offered a swift and 
stirring way out. But it was neither an effectual nor 
a lasting escape. The war with Spain, the industrial 
turmoil, the growth of social consciousness and new ideas 
of responsibility made America look for fresh valuations, 
more searching songs. Hovey began to go deeper into 
himself and his age; in the Mid-West, William Vaughn 
Moody grappled with the problems of his times only to 
have his work cut short by death in 19 10. But these two 
were exceptions; in the main, it was another interval — 
two decades of appraisal and expectancy, of pause and 
preparation. 

interim — 1 89019 12 

This interval of about twenty years was notable for 
its effort to treat the spirit of the times with a cheerful 
evasiveness, a humorous unconcern ; its most representa- 
tive craftsmen were, with four exceptions, the writers 
of light verse. These four exceptions were Richard 
Hovey, Bliss Carman, William Vaughn Moody and Ed- 
win Markham. Both Hovey and Carman saw wider 
horizons and tuned their instruments to a larger music. 

Moody's power was still greater. In "An Ode in 
Time of Hesitation, " he protested against turning the 
"new-world victories into gain" and painted America 
on a majestic canvas. In "The Quarry" he celebrated 
America's part in preventing the breaking-up of China 
by the greedy empires of Europe (an act accomplished 
by John Hay, poet and diplomat). In "On a Soldier 
Fallen in the Philippines," a dirge wrenched from the 
depths of his nature, Moody cried out against our own 
grasping imperialists. It was the fulfilment of this earlier 
poem which found its fierce climax in the lengthy Ode, 
with lines like: 



12 Preface 

Was it for this our fathers kept the law? 

This crown shall crown their struggle and their truth? 

Are we the eagle nation Milton saw 

Mewing its mighty youth? . . . 

.... O ye who lead 

Take heed ! 

Blindness we may forgive, but baseness we will smite. 

Early in 1899, the name of Edwin Markham flashed 
across the land when, out of San Francisco, rose the 
sonorous challenge of "The Man with the Hoe." This 
poem, which has been ecstatically called "the battle-cry 
of the next thousand years" (Joaquin Miller declared it 
contained "The whole Yosemite — the thunder, the might, 
the majesty"), caught up, with a prophetic vibrancy, the 
passion for social justice that was waiting to be intensi- 
fied in poetry. Markham summed up and spiritualized 
the unrest that was in the air; in the figure of one man 
with a hoe, he drew a picture of men in the mines, men 
in the sweat-shop, men working without joy, without 
hope. To social consciousness he added social conscience. 
In a ringing blank verse, Markham crystallized the ex- 
pression of outrage, the heated ferment of the period. His 
was a vision of a new order, austere in beauty but deriv- 
ing its life-blood from the millions struggling in the 
depths. 

Inspiring as these examples were, they did not generate 
others of their kind; the field lay fallow for more than 
a decade. The lull was pronounced, the gathering storm 
remained inaudible. 

RENASCENCE — 1913 

Suddenly the "new" poetry burst upon us with unex- 
pected vigor and extraordinary variety. October, 19 12, 
saw the first issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, a 



Preface 13 

monthly that was to introduce the work of hitherto un- 
known poets and to herald the various groups, schools and 
"movements." The magazine came at the very moment 
before the breaking of the stcrm. Flashes and rumblings 
had already been troubling the literary heavens; a few 
months later — the deluge! ... By 1917, the "new" 
poetry was ranked as "America's first national art"; its 
success was sweeping, its sales unprecedented. People 
who never before had read verse, turned to it and found 
they could not only read but relish it. They discovered 
that for the enjoyment of poetry it was not necessary to 
have at their elbows a dictionary of rare words and 
classical references; they no longer were required to be 
acquainted with Latin legendry and the minor love-affairs 
of the major Greek divinities. Life was their glossary, 
not literature. The new product spoke to them in their 
own language. And it did more: it spoke to them of 
what they scarcely ever had heard expressed ; it was not 
only closer to their soil but nearer to their souls. 

ROBINSON AND MASTERS 

One reason why the new poetry achieved so sudden a 
success was its freedom from the traditionally stilted 
"poetic diction." Revolting strongly against the assump- 
tion that poetry must have a vocabulary of its own, the 
poets of the new era spoke in the oldest and most stirring 
tongue; they used a language that was the language not 
of the poetasters but of the people. In the tones of ordi- 
nary speech they rediscovered the strength, the dignity, 
the divine core of the commonplace. 

E. A. Robinson had already been employing the sharp 
epithet, the direct and clarifying utterance which was to 
become part of our present technique. As early as 1897, 
in The Children of the Night, Robinson anticipated the 



14 Preface 

brief characterizations and the etched outlines of Mas- 
ters's Spoon River Anthology. His sympathetic studies 
of men whose lives were, from a worldly standpoint, 
failures were a sharp reaction to the current high valua- 
tion on financial achievements, ruthless efficiency and 
success at any cost. 

Masters's most famous book will rank as one of the 
landmarks of American literature. In it, he has synthe- 
sized the small towns of the Mid-West with a background 
that is unmistakably local and implications that are uni- 
versal. This amazing volume, in its curiosity and compre- 
hensiveness, is a broad cross-section of whole communities. 
Beneath its surface tales and dramas, its condensation of 
grocery-store gossip, Spoon River Anthology is a great 
part of America in microcosm. The success of the 
volume was sensational. It was actually one of the sea- 
son's "best sellers ,, ; in a few months, it went into edi- 
tion after edition. People forgot Masters's revelation of 
the sordid cheats and hypocrisies, in their interest at see- 
ing their neighbors so pitilessly exposed. Yet had Masters 
dwelt only on the drab disillusion of the village, had he 
(as he was constantly in danger of doing) overemphasized 
the morbid episodes, he would have left only a spectacular 
and poorly-balanced work. But the book ascends to 
buoyant exaltation and ends on a plane of victorious 
idealism. In its wide gamut, Spoon River, rising from 
its narrow origins, reaches epical proportions. Indigenous 
to its roots, it is stark, unflinching, unforgettable. 

FROST AND SANDBURG 

The same year that brought forth Spoon River An- 
thology saw the American edition of Frost's North of 
Boston. It was evident at once that the true poet of 
New England had arrived. Unlike his predecessors, Frost 



Preface 15 

was never a poetic provincial — never parochial in the sense 
that America was still a literary parish of England. He 
is as native as the lonely farmhouses, the dusty blue- 
berries, the isolated people, the dried-up brooks and moun- 
tain intervals that he describes. Loving, above everything 
else, the beauty of the Fact, he shares, with Robinson and 
Masters, the determination to tell not merely the actual 
but the factual truth. But Frost, a less disillusioned 
though a more saddened poet, w r ears his rue and his 
realism with a difference. Where Robinson is down- 
right and definite, Frost diverges, going roundabout and, 
in his speculative w r andering, covering a wider territory 
of thought. Where Masters is violent and hotly scorn- 
ful, Frost is reticent and quietly sympathetic. Where 
Robinson, in his reticent disclosures and reminiscent 
moods, often reflects New England, Frost is New Eng- 
land. 

North of Boston is well described by the poet's own 
sub-title: "a book of people." In it one not only sees 
a countryside of people, one catches them thinking out 
loud, one can hear the very tones of their voices. Here 
we have speech so arranged and translated that the 
speaker is heard on the printed page; any reader will 
be led by the kind and color of these words into repro- 
ducing the changing accents in which they are supposed 
to be uttered. It is this insistence that "all poetry is the 
reproduction of the tones of actual speech, " that gives 
these poems, as well as the later ones, a quickly-communi- 
cated emotional appeal. 

Frost is by no means the dark naturalist that many 
suspect. Behind the mask of "grimness" which many 
of his critics have fastened upon him, there is a continual 
elfin pucker; a whimsical smile, a half-disclosed raillery 
glints beneath his most somber monologues. His most 



1 6 Preface 

concrete facts are symbols of spiritual values; through his 
very reticence one hears more than the voice of New 
England. 

Just so, the great Mid- West, that vast region of steel 
mills and slaughter-houses, of cornfields and prairies, of 
crowded cities and empty skies, speaks through Carl Sand- 
burg. In Sandburg, industrial America has at last found 
its voice: Chicago Poems (1916), Cornhuskers (1918), 
Smoke and Steel ( 1 920) vibrate with the immense purring 
of dynamos, the swishing rhythms of threshing arms, the 
gossip and laughter of construction gangs, the gigantic 
and tireless energy of the modern machine. Frankly 
indebted to Whitman, Sandburg's poems are less sweeping 
but more varied; musically his lines mark a real ad- 
vance. He sounds the extremes of the gamut: there are 
few poems in our language more violent than "To a 
Contemporary Bunkshooter," few lyrics as hushed and 
tender as "Cool Tombs." 

When Chicago Poems first appeared, it was received 
with a disfavor ranging from hesitant patronization to 
the scornful jeers of the academicians. Sandburg was 
accused of verbal anarchy; of a failure to distinguish 
prose matter from poetic material; of uncouthness, vul- 
garity, of assaults on the English language and a score 
of other crimes. In the face of those who still see only 
a coarseness and distorted veritism in Sandburg, it can- 
not be said too often that he is brutal only when dealing 
with brutal things; that his "vulgarity" springs from 
an immense love of life, not from a merely decorative 
part of it; that his bitterest invectives are the result of 
a healthy disgust of shams; that, behind the force of his 
projectile-phrases, there burns the greater flame of his 
pity; that the strength of his hatred is exceeded only by 
the mystic challenge of his love. 



Preface 17 

THE IM AGISTS AND AMY LOWELL 

Sandburg established himself as the most daring user 
of American words — rude words ranging from the racy 
metaphors of the soil to the slang of the street. But even 
before this, the possibilities of a new vocabulary were 
being tested. As early as 1865, Whitman was saying, 
"We must have new words, new potentialities of speech 
— an American range of self-expression. . . . The 
new times, the new people need a tongue according, yes, 
and what is more, they will have such a tongue — will 
not be satisfied until it is evolved." 

It is curious to think that one of the most effective 
agents to fulfil Whitman's prophecy and free modern 
poetry from its mouldering diction was that little band 
of preoccupied specialists, the Imagists. Ezra Pound 
was the first to gather the insurgents into a definite 
group. During the winter of 1913, he collected a number 
of poems illustrating the Imagist point of view and had 
them printed in a volume: Des Imagistes (1914). A 
little later, Pound withdrew from the clan. The rather 
queerly assorted group began to disintegrate and Amy 
Lowell, then in England, brought the best of the younger 
members together in three yearly anthologies {Some Ima- 
gist Poets) which appeared in 1915, 1916 and 1917. 
There were, in Miss Lowell's new grouping, three Eng- 
lishmen (D. H. Lawrence, Richard Aldington, F. S. 
Flint), three Americans (H. D., John Gould Fletcher, 
Amy Lowell), and their creed, summed up in six articles 
of faith, was as follows: 

1. To use the language of common speech, but to employ 
always the exact word, not the merely decorative word. 

2. To create new rhythms — as the expression of new moods. 
We do not insist upon ''free-verse" as the only method of 



1 8 Preface 

writing poetry. . . . We do believe that the individuality of 
a poet may often be better expressed in free verse than, in 
conventional forms. 

3. To allow absolute freedom in the choice of subject. 

4. To present an image (hence the name: "Imagist"). We 
are not a school of painters, but we believe that poetry should 
render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities, 
however magnificent and sonorous. 

5. To produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred 
or indefinite. 

6. Finally, most of us believe that concentration is the very 
essence of poetry. 

It does not seem possible that these six obvious and 
almost platitudinous principles, which the Imagists so 
often neglected in their poetry, could have evoked the 
storm of argument and fury that broke as soon as the 
militant Amy Lowell began to champion them. Far 
from being revolutionary, these principles were not new; 
they were not even thought so by their sponsors. The 
Imagists themselves realized they were merely restating 
ideals which had fallen into desuetude, and declared, 
"They are the essentials of all great poetry, indeed of all 
great literature. " And yet many conservative critics, joined 
by the one hundred per cent reactionaries, rushed wildly 
to combat these "heresies"! They forgot that, in trying 
to protect the future from such lawlessness as "using 
the exact word," from allowing "freedom in the choice 
of subject," from the importance of "concentration," 
they were actually attacking the highest traditions of 
their enshrined past. 

The controversy succeeded in doing even more than 
the work of the Imagists themselves. Miss Lowell was 
left to carry on the battle single-handed; to defend the 
theories which, in practice, she was beginning to violate 
brilliantly. By all odds, the most energetic and unflagging 



Preface 19 

experimenter, Miss Lowell's versatility became amazing. 
She has written Chaucerian stanzas, polyphonic prose, 
monologs in her native New England dialect, irregular 
vers libre, conservative couplets, echoes from the Japanese, 
translations from the Chinese, even primitve re-creations 
of Indian folk-lore! 

The work of the Imagists was done. Its members 
began to develop themselves by themselves. They had 
helped to swell the tide of realistic and romantic nat- 
uralism — a tide of which their contribution was merely 
one wave, a high breaker that carried its impact far 
inshore. ^ ^Jfi^^ 

THE NEW FOLK-POETRY 

In a country that has not been mellowed by antiquity, 
that has not possessed songs for its peasantry or tradi- 
tions for its singers, one cannot look for a wealth of folk 
stuff. In such a country — the United States, to be 
specific — what folk-poetry there is, has followed the path 
of the pioneer. At first these homely songs were merely 
adaptations and localized versions of English ballads and 
border minstrelsy, of which the "Lonesome Tunes" dis- 
covered in the Kentucky mountains by Howard Brockway 
and Loraine Wyman are excellent examples. But later, 
a more definitely native spirit found expression in the 
various sections of these states. 

In the West today there is a revival of interest in 
backwoods melodies and folk-created verse. John A. 
Lomax has published two volumes of cowboy songs — 
most of them anonymous — full of tang, wild fancy and 
robust humor. Mary Austin, Natalie Curtis Burlin and 
Lew Sarett are chief among those who have attempted 
to bring the spirit of Indian tunes and chants into our 
poetry. The tradition of Harte and Hay is being 



20 Preface 



carried on by such racy interpreters as Harry Herbert 
Knibbs, Badger Clark and Edwin Ford Piper. But, of 
all contemporaries who approximate the spirit of folk- 
poetry, none has made more striking or more indubitably 
American contributions than Vachel Lindsay of Spring- 
field, Illinois. 

LINDSAY AND OPPENHEIM 

Lindsay is essentially a people's poet. He does not 
hesitate to express himself in terms of the lowest com- 
mon denominator; his fingers are alternately on his pen 
and the public pulse. Living near enough the South to 
appreciate the negro, Lindsay has been tremendously 
influenced by the colorful suggestions, the fantastic super- 
stitions, the revivalistic gusto and, above all, by the 
curiously syncopated music that characterize the black 
man in America. In "The Congo" the words roll with 
the solemnity of an exhortation, dance with a grotesque 
fervor or snap, wink, crackle and leap with all the 
humorous rhythms of a piece of "ragtime." Lindsay 
catches the burly color and boisterous music of camp- 
meetings, minstrel shows, revival jubilees. 

And Lindsay does more. He carries his democratic 
determinations further than any of his compatriots. His 
dream is of the great communal Art; he preaches the 
gospel that all villages should be centers of beauty, all its 
citizens, artists. At heart a missionary even more than 
a minstrel, Lindsay often loses himself in his own 
evangelism; worse, he frequently cheapens himself and 
caricatures his own gift by pandering to the vaudeville 
instinct that insists on putting a noisy "punch" into 
everything, regardless of taste, artistry or a sense of pro- 
portion. He is most impressive when he is least frenzied, 
when he is purely fantastic or when a greater theme and 



Preface 21 

a finer restraint (as in "The Eagle That Is Forgotten") 
unite to create a preaching that does not cease to be 
poetry. 

Something of the same blend of prophet and poet is 
found in the work of James Oppenheim. Oppenheim is 
a throwback to the ancient Hebrew singers; the music of 
the Psalms rolls through his lines, the fire of Isaiah 
kindles his spirit. This poetry, with its obvious re- 
minders of Whitman, is biblical in its inflection, Ori- 
ental in its heat. It runs through forgotten centuries 
and brings buried Asia to busy America; it carries to 
the Western world the color of the East. In books like 
War and Laughter and Songs for the New Age, the 
race of god-breakers and god-makers speaks with a new 
voice; here, with analytic intensity, the old iconoclasm 
and still older worship are again united. 

SUMMARY THE NEW SPIRIT 

Most of the poets represented in these pages have found 
a fresh and vigorous material in a world of honest and 
often harsh reality. They respond to the spirit of their 
times; not only have their views changed, their vision 
has been widened to include things unknown to the poet 
of yesterday. They have learned to distinguish real 
beauty from mere prettiness; to wring loveliness out of 
squalor; to find wonder in neglected places. 

And with the use of the material of everyday life, 
there has come a further simplification: the use of the 
language of everyday speech. The stilted and mouth- 
filling phrases have been practically discarded in favor 
of words that are part of our daily vocabulary. It would 
be hard at present to find a representative poet employing 
such awkward and outworn contractions as 'twixt, 
'mongst, ope' ; such evidences of poor padding as adown, 



22 Preface 

did go, doth smile; such dull rubber-stamps {cliches is 
the French term) as heavenly blue, roseate glow, golden 
hope, girlish grace, gentle breeze, etc. The per adven- 
tures, forsooths and mayhaps have disappeared. And, as 
the speech of the modern poet has grown less elaborate, 
so have the patterns that embody it. Not necessarily dis- 
carding rhyme, regular rhythm or any of the musical 
assets of the older poets, the forms have grown more 
flexible; the intricate versification has given way to 
simpler diction, direct vision and lines that reflect and 
suggest the tones of animated or exalted speech. The 
result of this has been a great gain both in sincerity and 
intensity; it has enabled the poet of today to put greater 
emphasis on his emotion rather than on the cloak that 
covers it. 

One could go into minute particulars concerning the 
growth of an American spirit in our literature and point 
out how many of the latter-day poets have responded to 
native forces larger than their backgrounds. Such a 
course would be endless and unprofitable. It is pertinent, 
however, to observe that, young as this nation is, it is 
already being supplied with the stuff of legends, ballads 
and even epics. The modern singer has turned to cele- 
brate his own folk-tales. It is particularly interesting to 
observe how the figure of Lincoln has been treated by 
the best of our living poets. I have, accordingly, included 
six poems by six writers, each differing in manner, 
technique and point of view. 

To those who still complain that this modern poetry 
lacks the clear, simple beauty found in the ripe literature 
of the past, it may be answered that this is a complex, 
unripe and experimental age. It is only when we under- 
stand our "new" American writing to be part of a 
literature of protest — protest against ugliness, machine- 



Preface 23 

made progress, standardized "success" — that we can under- 
stand and appreciate its quality. As The Literary Review 
(N. Y. Post) said, in an editorial in January, 1922: 
"We could not go on with sentimental novels and spine- 
less lyrics forever. The artists had to refocus the instru- 
ment and look at reality again. And what the honest 
saw was not beautiful as Tennyson knew beauty, not 
grand, not even very pleasant. It is their task to make 
beauty out of it, beauty of a new kind probably, because 
it will accompany new truth; but they must have time. 
The 'new' literature deserves criticism, but it also deserves 
respect." 

For the rest, I leave the casual reader, as well as the 
student, to discover the awakened vigor and energy in 
this, one of the few great poetic periods in native litera- 
ture. 



Emily Dickinson 



Emily Dickinson, whose work is one of the most original 
contributions to recent poetry, was born in Amherst, Massa- 
chusetts, December 10, 1830. She was a physical as well as a 
spiritual hermit, actually spending most of her life without 
setting foot beyond her doorstep. She wrote her short, intro- 
spective verses without thought of publication, and it was not 
until 1890, four years after her death, that the first volume 
of her posthumous poetry appeared with an introduction by 
Thomas Wentworth Higginson. 

"She habitually concealed her mind, like her person, from 
all but a very few friends," writes Higginson, "and it was 
with great difficulty that she was persuaded to print, during her 
lifetime, three or four poems." Yet she wrote almost five hun- 
dred of these direct and spontaneous illuminations, sending 
many of them in letters to friends, or (written on chance slips 
of paper and delivered without further comment) to her sister 
Sue. Slowly the peculiar, Blake-like quality of her thought 
won a widening circle of readers; Poems (1890) was followed 
by Poems — Second Series (1892) and Poems — Third Series 
(1896), the contents being collected and edited by her two 
friends, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd. 
Several years later, a further generous volume was assembled 
by her niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, entitled The Single 
Hound (1914). 

The sharp quality of her work, with its cool precision and 
clear imagery, makes her akin, at least in technique, to the 
later Imagists. (See Preface.) But a passionate and almost 
mystical warmth brings her closer to the great ones of her 
time. "An epigrammatic Walt Whitman," some one has called 
her, a characterization which, while enthusiastic to the point of 
exaggeration, expresses the direction if not the execution of her 
art. Technically, Emily Dickinson's work is strikingly uneven; 
many of her poems are no more than rough sketches, awkwardly 
filled in; even some of her finest lines are marred by the in- 
trusion of merely trivial conceits or forced "thought-rhymes." 

25 



26 Emily Dickinson 

But the best of her work is incomparable in its strange cadence 
and quiet intensity. Her verses are like a box of many jewels, 
sparkling with an unexpected brilliancy. 

Emily Dickinson died, in the same place she was born, at 
Amherst, May 15, 1886. 



CHARTLESS 

I never saw a moor, 

I never saw the sea; 

Yet now I know how the heather looks, 

And what a wave must be. 



I never spoke with God, 
Nor visited in Heaven; 
Yet certain am I of the spot 
As if the chart were given. 



INDIAN SUMMER 

These are the days when birds come back, 
A very few, a bird or two, 
To take a backward look. 

These are the days when skies put on 
The old, old sophistries of June, — 
A blue and gold mistake. 

Oh, fraud that can not cheat the bee, 
Almost thy plausibility 
Induces my belief, 

Till ranks of seeds their witness bear, 
And softly through the altered air 
Hurries a timid leaf! 



Emily Dickinson 27 

Oh, sacrament of summer days, 
Oh, last communion in the haze, 
Permit a child to join, 

Thy sacred emblems to partake, 
Thy consecrated bread to break, 
Taste thine immortal wine! 

SUSPENSE 

Elysium is as far as to 

The very nearest room, 

If in that room a friend await 

Felicity or doom. 

What fortitude the soul contains, 
That it can so endure 
The accent of a coming foot, 
The opening of a door. 

A CEMETERY 

This quiet Dust was Gentlemen and Ladies, 

And Lads and Girls; 
Was laughter and ability and sighing, 

And frocks and curls. 
This passive place a Summer's nimble mansion, 

Where Bloom and Bees 
Fulfilled their Oriental Circuit, 

Then ceased like these. 

BECLOUDED 

The sky is low, the clouds are mean, 
A travelling flake of snow 



Emily Dickinson 

Across a barn or through a rut 
Debates if it will go. 

A narrow wind complains all day- 
How some one treated him; 
Nature, like us, is sometimes caught 
Without her diadem. 



PEDIGREE 

The pedigree of honey 
Does not concern the bee; 

A clover, any time, to him 
Is aristocracy. 



Thomas Bailey Aldrich 

Thomas Bailey Aldrich was born in 1836 at Portsmouth, New 
Hampshire, where he spent most of the sixteen years which he 
has recorded in that delightful memoir, The Story of a Bad 
Boy (1869). From 1855 to 1866 he held various journalistic 
positions, associating himself with the leading metropolitan 
literati. A few years later he became editor of the famous 
Atlantic Monthly, holding that position from 1881 to 1890. 

Aldrich's work falls into two sharply-divided classes. The 
first half is full of overloaded phrase-making, fervid extrava- 
gances. The reader sinks beneath clouds of damask, azure, 
emerald, pearl and gold; he is drowned in a sea of musk, aloes, 
tiger-lilies, spice, soft music, orchids, attar-breathing dusks. 
Too often, Aldrich dwelt in a literary Orientalism; his Cloth 
of Gold was suffused with "vanilla-flavored adjectives and 
patchouli-scented participles" (to quote Holmes), laboring hard 
to create an exotic atmosphere by a wearisome profusion of 
lotus blossoms, sandalwood, spikenard, blown roses, diaphanous 
gauzes, etc. 

The second phase of Aldrich's art is more human in appeal 
as it is surer in artistry. "In the little steel engravings that 



Thomas Bailey Aldrich 29 

are the best expressions of his peculiar talent," writes Percy H. 
Boynton, "there is a fine simplicity; but it is the simplicity of 
an accomplished woman of the world rather than of a village 
maid." Although Aldrich bitterly resented the charge that he 
was a maker of tiny perfections, a carver of cherry-stones, 
those poems of his which have the best chance of permanence 
are the short lyrics and a few of the sonnets, exquisite in design. 
The best of Aldrich's diffuse poetry has been collected in an 
inclusive Household Edition, published by Houghton, Mifflin 
and Company. He died in 1907. 



MEMORY 

My mind lets go a thousand things, 
Like dates of wars and deaths of kings, 
And yet recalls the very hour — 
'Twas noon by yonder village tower, 
And on the last blue noon in May — 
The wind came briskly up this way, 
Crisping the brook beside the road; 
Then, pausing here, set down its load 
Of pine-scents, and shook listlessly 
Two petals from that wild-rose tree. 



"ENAMORED ARCHITECT OF AIRY RHYME" 

Enamored architect of airy rhyme, 

Build as thou wilt, heed not what each man says. 

Good souls, but innocent of dreamers' ways, 

Will come, and marvel why thou wastest time; 

Others, beholding how thy turrets climb 

'Twixt theirs and heaven, will hate thee all thy days; 

But most beware of those w r ho come to praise. 

O Wondersmith, O worker in sublime 



30 Thomas Bailey Aldrich 

And heaven-sent dreams, let art be all in all; 
Build as thou wilt, unspoiled by praise or blame, 
Build as thou wilt, and as thy light is given; 
Then, if at last the airy structure fall, 
Dissolve, and vanish — take thyself no shame. 
They fail, and they alone, who have not striven. 



John Hay 

John Hay was born at Salem, Indiana, in 1838, graduated 
from Brown University in 1858 and was admitted to the Illinois 
bar a few years later. He became private secretary to Lin- 
coln, then major and assistant adjutant-general under General 
Gilmore, then secretary of the Legation at Paris, charge 
d'affaires at Vienna and secretary of legation at Madrid. 

His few vivid Pike County Ballads came more as a happy 
accident than as a deliberate creative effort. When Hay re- 
turned from Spain in 1870, bringing with him his Castilian 
Days, he had visions of becoming an orthodox lyric poet. 
But he found everyone reading Bret Harte's short stories and 
the new expression of the rude West. (See Preface.) He specu- 
lated upon the possibility of doing something similar, translating 
the characters into poetry. The result was the six racy ballads 
in a vein utterly different from everything Hay wrote before or 
after. 

Hay was in politics all the later part of his life, ranking as 
one of the most brilliant Secretaries of State the country has 
ever had. He died in 1905. 



JIM BLUDSO, 

OF THE PRAIRIE BELLE 

Wall, no! I can't tell whar he lives, 
Becase he don't live, you see ; 

Leastways, he's got out of the habit 
Of livin' like you and me. 



John Hay 31 

Whar have you been for the last three year 

That you haven't heard folks tell 
How Jimmy Bludso passed in his checks 

The night of the Prairie Belle? 

He warn't no saint, — them engineers 

Is all pretty much alike, — 
One wife in Natchez-under-the-Hill 

And another one here, in Pike; 
A keerless man in his talk was Jim, 

And an awkward hand in a row, 
But he never flunked, and he never lied, — 

I reckon he never knowed how. 

And this w T as all the religion he had : 

To treat his engine well; 
Never be passed on the river; 

To mind the pilot's bell ; 
And if ever the Prairie Belle took fire, 

A thousand times he swore, 
He'd hold her nozzle agin the bank 

Till the last soul got ashore. 

All boats has their day on the Mississip, 

And her day come at last, — 
The Movastar was a better boat, 

But the Belle she wouldn't be passed. 
And so she came tearin' along that night — 

The oldest craft on the line — 
With a nigger squat on her safety-valve, 

And her furnace crammed, rosin and pine. 

The fire bust out as she clar'd the bar, 

And burnt a hole in the night, 
And quick as a flash she turned and made 

For that wilier-bank on the right. 



32 John Hay 

Thar was runnirv and cussing but Jim yelled out, 

Over all the infernal roar, 
"I'll hold her nozzle agin the bank 

Till the last galoot's ashore." 

Through the hot, black breath of the burnin' boat 

Jim Bludso's voice was heard, 
And they all had trust in his cussedness, 

And knowed he would keep his word. 
And, sure's you're born, they all got off 

Afore the smokestacks fell, — 
And Bludso's ghost went up alone 

In the «smoke of the Prairie Belle. 

He warn't no saint, — but at jedgement 

I'd run my chance with Jim, 
'Longside of some pious gentlemen 

That wouldn't shook hands with him. 
He seen his duty, a dead-sure thing, — 

And went for it thar and then; 
And Christ ain't a goin' to be too hard 

On a man that died for men. 



Bret Harte 

(Francis) Bret Harte was born August 25, 1839, at Albany, 
New York. His childhood was spent in various cities of the 
East. Late in 1853, his widowed mother went to California 
with a party of relatives, and two months later, when he was 
fifteen, Bret Harte and his sister followed. 

Harte's fame came suddenly. Late in the sixties, he had 
written a burlesque in rhyme of two Western gamblers trying 
to fleece a guileless Chinaman who claimed to know nothing 
about cards but who, it turned out, was scarcely as innocent 
as he appeared. Harte, in the midst of writing serious poetry, 
had put the verses aside as too crude and trifling for publica- 
tion. Some time later, just as The Overland Monthly was 



Bret Harte 33 

going to press, it was discovered that the form was one page 
short. Having nothing else on hand, Harte had these rhymes 
set up. Instead of passing unnoticed, the poem was quoted 
everywhere; it swept the West and captivated the East. When 
his volume The Luck of Roaring Camp followed, Harte be- 
came not only a national but an international figure. 

In 1872 Harte, encouraged by his success, returned to his 
native East; in 1878 he went to Germany as consul. Two years 
later he was transferred to Scotland and, after five years there, 
went to London, where he remained the rest of his life. 
Harte's later period remains mysteriously shrouded. He never 
came back to America, not even for a visit; he separated him- 
self from all the most intimate associations of his early life. 
He died, suddenly, at Camberley, England, May 6, 1902. 



"JIM" 

Say there! PVaps 
Some on you chaps 

Might know Jim Wild? 
Well, — no offense: 
Thar ain't no sense 

In gittin' riled! 

Jim was my chum 

Up on the Bar: 
That's why I come 

Down from up yar, 
Lookin' for Jim. 
Thank ye, sir! You 
Ain't of that crew, — 

Blest if you are! 

Money? Not much: 
That ain't my kind ; 

I ain't no such. 

Rum? I don't mind, 

Seem' it's you. 



34 Bret Harte 

Well, this yer Jim, — 
Did you know him ? 
Jes' 'bout your size; 
Same kind of eyes; — 
Well, that is strange: 
Why, it's two year 
Since he came here, 
Sick, for a change. 

Well, here's to us: 

Eh? 
The h you say ! 

Dead? 
That little cuss? 

What makes you star', 
You over thar? 
Can't a man drop 
's glass in yer shop 
But you must r'ar? 
It wouldn't take 

D d much to break 

You and your bar. 

Dead! 
Poor — little — Jim ! 
Why, thar was me, 
Jones, and Bob Lee, 
Harry and Ben, — 
No-account men: 
Then to take him I 

Well, thar — Good-bye. 
No more, sir — I — 
Eh? 



Bret Harte 35 

What's that you say? 
Why, dern it! — sho! — 
No? Yes! By Joe! 

Sold! 
Sold! Why, you limb, 
You ornery, 

Derned, old, 
Long-legged Jim. 



PLAIN LANGUAGE FROM TRUTHFUL JAMES 

{Table Mountain, 1870) 

Which I wish to remark 

And my language is plain, 
That for ways that are dark 

And for tricks that are vain, 
The heathen Chinee is peculiar, 

Which the same I would rise to explain. 

Ah Sin was his name; 

And I shall not deny, 
In regard to the same, 

What that name might imply; 
But his smile, it was pensive and childlike, 

As I frequent remarked to Bill Nye. 

It was August the third, 

And quite soft w r as the skies; 
Which it might be inferred 

That Ah Sin was likewise; 
Yet he played it that day upon William 

And me in a way I despise. 



36 Bret Harte 

Which we had a small game, 

And Ah Sin took a hand: 
It was Euchre. The same 

He did not understand; 
But he smiled as he sat by the table, 

With a smile that was childlike and bland. 

Yet the cards they were stocked 

In a way that I grieve, 
And my feelings were 'shocked 

At the state of Nye's sleeve, 
Which was stuffed full of aces and bowers, 

And the same with intent to deceive; 

But the hands that were played 

By that heathen Chinee, 
And the points that he made, 

Were quite frightful to see, — 
Till at last he put down a right bower 

Which the same Nye had dealt unto me! 

Then I looked up at Nye, 

And he gazed upon me; 
And he rose with a sigh, 

And said, "Can this be? 
We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor," — 

And he went for that heathen Chinee. 

In the scene that ensued 

I did not take a hand, 
But the floor it was strewed 

Like the leaves on the strand 
With the cards that Ah Sin had been hiding, 

In the game "he did not understand." 



Bret Harte 37 

In his sleeves, which were long, 

.He had twenty-four packs, — 
Which was coming it strong, 

Yet I state but the facts; 
And we found on his nails, which were taper, 

What is frequent in tapers, — that's wax. 

Which is why I remark, 

And my language is plain, 
That for ways that are dark 

And for tricks that are vain, 
The heathen Chinee is peculiar, — 

Which the same I am free to maintain. 



Joaquin Miller 

Cincinnatus (Heine) Miller, or, to give him the name he 
adopted, Joaquin Miller, was born in 1841 of immigrant 
parents. As he himself writes, "My cradle was a covered 
wagon, pointed west. I was born in a covered wagon, I am 
told, at or about the time it crossed the line dividing Indiana 
from Ohio." 

At fifteen we find Miller living with the Indians as one of 
them; in 1859 ( at tne a g e of eighteen) he attends a mission- 
school "college" in Eugene, Oregon; between i860 and 1865 
he is express-messenger, editor of a pacifist newspaper that is 
suppressed for opposing the Civil War, lawyer and, occasion- 
ally, a poet. He holds a minor judgeship from 1866 to 1870. 

His first book {Specimens) appears in 1868, his second 
{Joaquin et al., from which he took his name) in 1869. No 
response — not even from "the bards of San Francisco Bay" to 
whom he has dedicated the latter volume. He is chagrined, 
discouraged, angry. He shakes the dust of America from his 
feet; goes to London; publishes a volume {Pacific Poems) at 
his own expense and — overnight — becomes a sensation ! 

His dramatic success in England is easily explained. He 
brought to the calm air of literary London, a breath of the 



38 Joaquin Miller 

great winds of the plain. The more he exaggerated his 
crashing effects, the better the English public liked it. When 
he entered Victorian parlors in his velvet jacket, hip-boots and 
flowing hair, childhood visions of the "wild and woolly West- 
erner" were realized and the very bombast of his work was 
glorified as "typically American." 

From 1872 to 1886, Miller traveled about the Continent. 
In 1887 ne returned to California, dwelling on the Heights, 
helping to found an experimental Greek academy for aspiring 
writers. He died there, after a determinedly picturesque life, 
in sight of the Golden Gate, in 1913. 



FROM "BYRON" 

In men whom men condemn as ill 

I find so much of goodness still, 

In men whom men pronounce divine 

I find so much of sin and blot, 

I do not dare to draw a line 

Between the two, where God has not. 



COLUMBUS 1 

Behind him lay the gray Azores, 

Behind the Gates of Hercules; 
Before him not the ghost of shores, 

Before him only shoreless seas. 
The good mate said: "Now must we pray, 

For lo! the very stars are gone. 
Brave Admiral, speak, what shall I say?" 

"Why, say 'Sail on ! sail on ! and on !' ' 

1 Permission to reprint this poem was granted by the Harr 
Wagner Publishing Co., San Francisco, California, publishers of 
Joaquin Miller's Complete Poetical Works. 



Joaquin Miller 39 

"My men grow mutinous day by day; 

My men grow ghastly wan and weak." 
The stout mate thought of home ; a spray 

Of salt wave washed his swarthy cheek. 
"What shall I say, brave Admiral, say, 

If we sight naught but seas at dawn?" 
"Why, you shall say at break of day, 

'Sail on! sail on! sail on! and on!' ' 

They sailed and sailed, as winds might blow, 

Until at last the blanched mate said, 
"Why, now not even God would know 

Should I and all my men fall dead. 
These very winds forget their way, 

For God from these dread seas is gone. 
Now speak, brave Admiral, speak and say" — 

He said: "Sail on! sail on! and on!" 

They sailed. They sailed. Then spake the mate: 

"This mad sea shows his teeth to-night. 
He curls his lip, he lies in wait, 

With lifted teeth, as if to bite! 
Brave Admiral, say but one good word : 

What shall we do when hope is gone?" 
The words leapt like a leaping sword : 

"Sail on! sail on! sail on! and on!" 

Then, pale and worn, he kept his deck, 

And peered through darkness. Ah, that night 
Of all dark nights ! And then a speck — 

A light! a light! a light! a light! 
It grew, a starlit flag unfurled ! 

It grew to be Time's burst of dawn. 
He gained a world; he gave that world 

Its grandest lesson: "On! sail on!" 



4-0 Edward Rowland Sill 

Edward Rowland Sill was born at Windsor, Connecticut, in 
1841. In 1861 he was graduated from Yale and shortly there- 
after his poor health compelled him West. After various un- 
successful experiments, he drifted into teaching, first in the high 
schools in Ohio, later in the English department of the Uni- 
versity of California. 

The Hermitage, his first volume, was published in 1867, a 
later edition (including later poems) appearing in 1889. His 
two posthumous books are Poems (1887) an d Hermione and 
Other Poems (1899). 

Sill died, after bringing something of the Eastern culture to 
the West, in 1887. 

OPPORTUNITY 

This I beheld, or dreamed it in a dream: — 

There spread a cloud of dust along a plain; 

And underneath the cloud, or in it, raged 

A furious battle, and men yelled, and -swords 

Shocked upon swords and shields. A prince's banner 

Wavered, then staggered backward, hemmed by foes. 

A craven hung along the battle's edge, 

And thought, "Had I a sword of keener steel — 

That blue blade that the king's son bears, — but this 

Blunt thing — !" he snapt and flung it from his hand, 

And lowering crept away and left the field. 

Then came the king's son, wounded, 'sore bestead, 

And weaponless, and saw the broken sword, 

Hilt-buried in the dry and trodden sand, 

And ran and snatched it, and with battle-shout 

Lifted afresh he hewed his enemy down, 

And saved a great cause that heroic day. 

Sidney Lanier 

Sidney Lanier was born at Macon, Georgia, February 3, 1842. 
His was a family of musicians (Lanier himself was a skilful 



Sidney Lanier 41 



performer on various instruments), and it is not surprising that 
his verse emphasizes — even overstresses — the influence of music 
on poetry. He attended Oglethorpe College, graduating at the 
age of eighteen (i860), and, a year later, volunteered as a 
private in the Confederate army. After several months' im- 
prisonment (he had been captured while acting as signal officer 
on a blockade-runner), Lanier was released in February, 1865. 

After studying and abandoning the practise of law, he be- 
came a flute-player in the Peabody Symphony Orchestra in 1873 
in Baltimore, where he had free access to the music and litera- 
ture he craved. Here he wrote all of his best poetry. In 1879, 
he was made lecturer on English in Johns Hopkins University, 
and it was for his courses there that he wrote his chief prose 
work, a brilliant if not conclusive study, The Science of English 
Verse. Besides his poetry, he wrote several books for boys, 
the two most popular being The Boy's Froissart (1878) and 
The Boy's King Arthur (1880). 

Lanier ranks high among our minor poets. Such a vigor- 
ous ballad as "The Song of the Chattahoochee," lyrics like 
"The Stirrup Cup" and parts of the symphonic "Hymns of the 
Marshes" are sure of a place in American literature. 

Lanier died, a victim of tuberculosis in the mountains of 
North Carolina, September 7, 1881. 

SONG OF THE CHATTAHOOCHEE x 

Out of the hills of Habersham, 

Down the valleys of Hall, 
I hurry amain to reach the plain, 
Run the rapid and leap the fall, 
Split at the rock and together again, 
Accept my bed, or narrow or wide, 
And flee from folly on every side 
With a lover $ pain to attain the plain 

Far from the hills of Habersham, 

Far from the valleys of Hall. 

1 From Poems of Sidney Lanier. Copyright, 1884, 1891, 1916, 
by Mary D. Lanier; published by Charles Scribner's Sons. By 
permission of the publishers. 



42 Sidney Lanier 

All down the hills of Habersham, 
All through the valleys of Hall, 
The rushes cried Abide, abide, 
The willful waterweeds held me thrall, 
The laving laurel turned my tide, 
The ferns and the fondling grass said Stay, 
The dewberry dipped for to work delay, 
And the little reeds sighed Abide, abide, 
Here in the hills of Habersham, 
Here in the valleys of Hall. 



High o'er the hills of Habersham, 

Veiling the valleys of Hall, 
The hickory told me manifold 
Fair tales of shade, the poplar tall 
Wrought me her shadowy self to hold, 
The chestnut, the oak, the walnut, the pine, 
Overleaning, with flickering meaning and sign, 
Said, Pass not, so cold, these manifold 

Deep shades of the hills of Habersham, 

These glades in the valleys of Hall. 



And oft in the hills of Habersham, 

And oft in the valleys of Hall, 
The white quartz shone, and the smooth brook-stone 
Did bar me of passage with friendly brawl, 
And many a luminous jewel lone 
— Crystals clear or acloud with mist, 
Ruby, garnet and amethyst — 
Made lures with the lights of streaming stone 

In the clefts of the hills of Habersham, 

In the beds of the valleys of Hall. 



Sidney Lanier 43 

But oh, not the hills of Habersham, 

And oh, not the valleys of Hall 
Avail: I am fain for to water the plain. 
Downward the voices of Duty call — 
Downward, to toil and be mixed with the main, 
The dry fields burn, and the mills are to turn, 
And a myriad flowers mortally yearn, 
And the lordly main from beyond the plain 

Calls o'er the hills of Habersham, 

Calls through the valleys of Hall. 



Charles Edward Carryl 

Charles Edward Carryl, father of the gifted Guy Wet- 
more Carryl (see page 92), was born in New York City, 
December 30, 184.2. He was an officer and director in various 
railroads but found leisure to write two of the few worthy 
rivals of the immortal Alice in W onderland. These two, Davy 
and the Goblin (1884), and The Admiral's Caravan (1891), 
contain many lively and diverting ballads as well as inspired 
nonsense verses in the manner of his famous model. 

C. E. Carryl lived the greater part of his life in New York 
but, on retiring from business, removed to Boston and lived there 
until his death, which occurred in the summer of 1920. 



ROBINSON CRUSOE'S STORY 

The night was thick and hazy 

When the "Piccadilly Daisy" 
Carried down the crew and captain in the sea; 

And I think the water drowned 'em 

For they never, never found 'em 
And I know they didn't come ashore with me. 



44 Charles Edward Carryl 

Oh! 'twas very sad and lonely 

When I found myself the only 
Population on this cultivated shore; 

But I've made a little tavern 

In a rocky little cavern, 
And I sit and watch for people at the door. 

I spent no time in looking 

For a girl to do my cooking, 
As I'm quite a clever hand at making stews; 

But I had that fellow Friday, 

Just to keep the tavern tidy, 
And to put a Sunday polish on my shoes. 

I have a little garden 

That Fm cultivating lard in, 
As the things I eat are rather tough and dry; 

For I live on toasted lizards, 

Prickly pears, and parrot gizzards, 
And I'm really very fond of beetle-pie. 

The clothes I had were furry, 
And it made me fret and worry 

When I found the moths were eating off the hair; 
And I had to scrape and sand 'em 
And I boiled 'em and I tanned 'em, 

Till I got the fine morocco suit I wear. 

I sometimes seek diversion 

In a family excursion 
With the few domestic animals you see; 

And we take along a carrot 

As refreshment for the parrot 
And a little can of jungleberry tea. 



Charles Edward Carryl 45 

Then we gather as we travel, 

Bits of moss and dirty gravel, 
And we chip off little specimens of stone; 

And we carry home as prizes 

Funny bugs, of handy sizes, 
Just to give the day a scientific tone. 

If the roads are wet and muddy 

We remain at home and study, — 
For the Goat is very clever at a sum, — 

And the Dog, instead of fighting, 

Studies ornamental writing, 
While the Cat is taking lessons on the drum. 

We retire at eleven, 

And we rise again at seven ; 
And I wish to call attention, as I close, 

To the fact that all the scholars 

Are correct about their collars, 
And particular in turning out their toes. 



James Whit comb Riley 

James Whitcomb Riley, who was possibly the most widely 
read native poet of his day, was born October 7, 1849, m 
Greenfield, Indiana, a small town twenty miles from Indian- 
apolis, where he spent his later years. Contrary to the popular 
belief, Riley was not, as many have gathered from his bucolic 
dialect poems, a struggling child of the soil; his father was a 
lawyer in comfortable circumstances and Riley was not only 
given a good education but was prepared for the law. How- 
ever, his temperament was restless; it made him try sign-paint- 
ing, circus advertising, journalism. 

In 1882, when he was on the staff of the Indianapolis Journal, 
he began the series of dialect poems which he claimed were by 
a rude and unlettered farmer, one "Benj. F. Johnson, of Boone, 



46 James White omb Riley 

the Hoosier poet" — printing long extracts from "Boone's" un- 
grammatical and badly-spelt letters to prove his find. A collec- 
tion of these rustic verses appeared, in 1883, as The Ole 
Swimmin' Hole; and Riley leaped into widespread popularity. 

Other collections followed rapidly: Afterwhiles (1887), Old- 
Fashioned Roses (1888), Rhymes of Childhood (1890). All met 
an instant response; Riley endeared himself, by his homely 
idiom and his ingenuity, to a countryful of readers, adolescent 
and adult. 

That work of his which may endure, will survive because of 
the personal flavor that Riley often poured into it. Such poems 
as "When the Frost is on the Punkin," and "The Raggedy 
Man" are a part of American folk literature; "Little Orphant 
Annie" is read wherever there is a schoolhouse or, for that 
matter, a nursery. 

Riley died in his little house in Lockerbie Street, Indianapolis, 
July 22, 1916. 



"WHEN THE FROST IS ON THE PUNKIN" 1 

When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the 

shock, 
And you hear the kyouck and gobble of the struttin' 

turkey-cock, 
And the clackin' of the guineys, and the cluckin' of the 

hens, 
And the rooster's hallylooyer as he tiptoes on the fence; 
O, it's then the time a feller is a-feelin' at his best, 
With the risin' sun to greet him from a night of peaceful 

rest, 
As he leaves the house, bareheaded, and goes out to feed 

the stock, 
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the 

shock. 

1 From the Biographical Edition of the Complete Works of 
James Whitcomb Riley. Copyright, 1913. Used by special per- 
mission of the publishers, The Bobbs-Merrill Company. 



James Whit comb Riley ^rj 

They's something kindo' harty-like about the atmusfere 
When the heat of summer's over and the coolin' fall is 

here — 
Of course we miss the flowers, and the blossoms on the 

trees, 
And the mumble of the hummin'-birds and buzzin' of 

the bees; 
But the air's so appetizin' ; and the landscape through the 

haze 
Of a crisp and sunny morning of the airly autumn days 
Is a pictur' that no painter has the colorin' to mock — 
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the 

shock. 

The husky, rusty russel of the tossels of the corn, 
And the raspin' of the tangled leaves as golden as the 

morn ; 
The stubble in the furries — kindo' lonesome-like, but still 
A-preachin' sermuns to us of the barns they growed to fill ; 
The strawstack in the medder, and the reaper in the shed ; 
The hosses in theyr stalls below — the clover overhead! — 
O, it sets my hart a-clickin' like the tickin' of a clock 
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the 

shock. 

Then your apples all is gethered, and the ones a feller 

keeps 
Is poured around the cellar-floor in red and yaller heaps; 
And your cider-makin's over, and your wimmern-folks 

is through 
With theyr mince and apple-butter, and theyr souse and 

sausage too! . . . 
I don't know how to tell it — but ef such a thing could be 
As the angels wantin' boardin', and they'd call around 

on me — 



48 James Whitcomb Riley 

I'd want to 'commodate 'em — all the whole-indui'in* 

flock- 
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the 

shock. 

A PARTING GUEST 1 

What delightful hosts are they — 

Life and Love! 
Lingeringly I turn away, 

This late hour, yet glad enough 
They have not withheld from me 

Their high hospitality. 
So, with face lit with delight 

And all gratitude, I stay 

Yet to press their hands and say, 
"Thanks. — So fine a time! Good night." 

1 From the Biographical Edition of the Complete Works of 
James Whitcomb Riley. Copyright, 1913. Used by special per- 
mission of the publishers, The Bobbs-Merrill Company. 



Eugene Field 

Although born (September 3, 1850) in St. Louis, Missouri, 
Eugene Field belongs to the literature of the far West. Colo- 
rado and the Rocky Mountain region claimed him as their own 
and Field never repudiated the allegiance; he even called most 
of his poetry "Western Verse." 

Field's area of education embraced New England, Missouri, 
and what European territory he could cover in six months. 
At twenty-three he became a reporter on the St. Louis Evening 
Journal, the rest of his life being given to journalism. 

Though Field may be overrated in some quarters, there 
is little doubt that certain of his child lyrics, his homely phi- 
losophic ballads (in the vein which Harte and Riley popu- 
larized) and his brilliant burlesques will occupy a niche in 



Eugene Field 49 

American letters. Readers of all tastes will find much to de- 
light them in the complete one-volume edition of his verse 
which was issued in 1910. 

Field died in Chicago, Illinois, November 4, 1895. 



LITTLE BOY BLUE 1 

The little toy dog is covered with dust, 

But sturdy and staunch he stands; 
The little toy soldier is red with rust, 

And his musket moulds in his hands. 
Time was when the little toy dog was new, 

And the soldier was passing fair; 
And that was the time when our Little Boy Blue 

Kissed them and put them there. 

"Now don't you go till I come," he said, 

"And don't you make any noise!" 
So, toddling off to his trundle bed, 

He dreamt of the pretty toys; 
And, as he was dreaming, an angel song 

Awakened our Little Boy Blue — 
Oh! the years are many, the years are long, 

But the little toy friends are true! 

Ay, faithful to Little Boy Blue they stand, 

Each in the same old place, 
Awaiting the touch of a little hand, 

The smile of a little face; 
And they wonder, as waiting the long years through 

In the dust of that little chair, 
What has become of our Little Boy Blue, 

Since he kissed them and put them there. 

1 Reprinted from The Complete Works of Eugene Field by 
permission of Charles Scribner's Sons, holders of the copyright. 



^O Eugene Field 



SEEIN' THINGS 1 

I ain't afraid uv snakes or toads, or bugs or worms or 

mice, 
An' things 'at girls are skeered uv I think are awful nice ! 
I'm pretty brave I guess; an' yet I hate to go to bed, 
For, when I'm tucked up warm an' snug an' when my 

prayers are said, 
Mother tells me "Happy Dreams" an' takes away the 

light, 
An' leaves me lyin' all alone an' seem' things at night ! 

Sometimes they're in the corner, sometimes they're by the 

door, 
Sometimes they're all a-standin' in the middle uv the 

floor; 
Sometimes they are a-sittin' down, sometimes they're 

walkin' round 
So softly and so creepy-like they never make a sound! 
Sometimes they are as black as ink, an' other times 

they're white — 
But color ain't no difference when you see things at night! 

Once, when I licked a feller 'at had just moved on our 

street, 
An' father sent me up to bed without a bite to eat, 
I woke up in the dark an' saw things standin' in a row, 
A-lookin' at me cross-eyed an' p'intin' at me — so! 
Oh, my! I wuz so skeered 'at time I never slep' a mite — 
It's almost alluz when I'm bad I see things at night! 



1 Reprinted from The Complete Works of Eugene Field by 
permission of Charles Scribner's Sons, holders of the copyright 



Eugene Field 51 

Lucky thing I ain't a girl or I'd be skeered to death! 
Bein' I'm a boy, I duck my head an' hold my breath. 
An' I am, oh so sorry I'm a naughty boy, an' then 
I promise to be better an' I say my prayers again! 
Gran'ma tells me that's the only way to make it right 
When a feller has been wicked an' sees things at night! 

An* so when other naughty boys would coax me into sin, 
I try to 'skwush the Tempter's voice 'at urges me within ; 
An' when they's pie for supper, or cakes 'at's big an' nice, 
I want to — but I do not pass my plate f'r them things 

twice! 
No, ruther let Starvation wnpe me slowly out o' sight 
Then I should keep a-livin' on an' seein' things at 

night ! 



Edwin Markham 

Edwin Markham was born in Oregon City, Oregon, April 23, 
1852, the youngest son of pioneer parents. His father died 
before the boy reached his fifth year and in 1857 he was taken 
by his mother to a wild valley in the Suisun Hills in central 
California. Here he grew to young manhood; farming, 
broncho-riding, laboring on a cattle ranch, educating himself in 
the primitive country schools and supplementing his studies 
with whatever books he could procure. 

In 1899, a new force surged through him; a sense of outrage 
at the inequality of human struggle voiced itself in the sweep- 
ing and sonorous poem, "The Man with the Hoe." (See 
Preface.) Inspired by Millet's painting, Markham made the 
bowed, broken French peasant a symbol of the poverty-stricken 
toiler in all lands — his was a protest not against labor but the 
drudgery, the soul-destroying exploitation of labor. 

The success of the poem upon its appearance in the San 
Francisco Examiner (January 15, 1899) was instantaneous and 
universal. The lines appeared in every part of the globe; it 
was quoted and copied in every walk of life, in the literary 



52 Edwin Markham 

world, the leisure world, the labor world. It was incorporated 
in Markham's first volume The Man with the Hoe, and Other 
Poems (1899). 

The same passion that fired Markham to champion the great 
common workers equipped him to write fittingly of the Great 
Commoner in Lincoln, and Other Poems (1901). 

Markham came East in 1901, making his home on Staten 
Island, New York. 



THE MAN WITH THE HOE 1 

Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans 

Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground, 

The emptiness of ages in his face, 

And on his back the burden of the world. 

Who made him dead to rapture and despair, 

A thing that grieves not and that never hopes, 

Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox? 

Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw? 

Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow? 

Whose breath blew out the light within this brain ? 



Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave 

To have dominion over sea and land ; 

To trace the stars and search the heavens for power; 

To feel the passion of Eternity? 

Is this the dream He dreamed who shaped the suns 

And marked their ways upon the ancient deep? 

Down all the caverns of Hell to their last gulf 

There is no shape more terrible than this — 

1 Revised version, 1920. Copyright by Edwin Markham. 



Edwin Markham 53 

More tongued with censure of the world's blind greed — 
More filled with signs and portents for the soul — 
More packt with danger to the universe. 

What gulfs between him and the seraphim! 
Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him 
Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades? 
What the long reaches of the peaks of song, 
The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose? 
Through this dread shape the suffering ages look; 
Time's tragedy is in that aching stoop ; 
Through this dread shape humanity betrayed, 
Plundered, profaned, and disinherited, 
Cries protest to the Judges of the World, 
A protest that is also prophecy. 

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands, 

Is this the handiwork you give to God, 

This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched? 

How will you ever straighten up this shape ; 

Touch it again with immortality; 

Give back the upward looking and the light; 

Rebuild in it the music and the dream; 

Make right the immemorial infamies, 

Perfidious w r rongs, immedicable woes? 

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands, 
How will the Future reckon with this man? 
How answer his brute question in that hour 
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake all shores? 
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings — 
With those who shaped him to the thing he is — 
When this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world, 
After the silence of the centuries? 



54 Edwin Markham 



PREPAREDNESS 

For all your days prepare, 
And meet them ever alike: 

When you are the anvil, bear — 
When you are the hammer, strike. 



LINCOLN, THE MAN OF THE PEOPLE 1 

When the Norn Mother saw the Whirlwind Hour 
Greatening and darkening as it hurried on, 
She left the Heaven of Heroes and came down 
To make a man to meet the mortal need. 
She took the tried clay of the common road — 
Clay warm yet with the genial heat of earth, 
Dasht through it all a strain of prophecy; 
Tempered the heap with thrill of human tears; 
Then mixt a laughter with the serious stuff. 
Into the shape she breathed a flame to light 
That tender, tragic, ever-changing face; 
And laid on him a sense of mystic powers, 
Moving — all husht — behind the mortal vail. 
Here was a man to hold against the world, 
A man to match the mountains and the sea. 

The color of the ground was in him, the red earth ; 

The smack and tang of elemental things: 

The rectitude and patience of the cliff; 

The good-will of the rain that loves all leaves; 

The friendly welcome of the wayside well; 

The courage of the bird that dares the sea; 

1 See pages 78, 84, 139, 142, 172. 



Edwin Markham $$ 

The gladness of the wind that shakes the corn; 
The pity of the snow that hides all scars; 
The secrecy of streams that make their w T ay 
Under the mountain to the rifted rock; 
The tolerance and equity of light 
That gives as freely to the shrinking flower 
As to the great oak flaring to the wind — 
To the grave's low hill as to the Matterhorn 
That shoulders out the sky. Sprung from the West, 
He drank the valorous youth of a new world. 
The strength of virgin forests braced his mind, 
The hush of spacious prairies stilled his soul. 
His words were oaks in acorns; and his thoughts 
Were roots that firmly gript the granite truth. 

Up from log cabin to the Capitol, 

One fire was on his spirit, one resolve — 

To send the keen ax to the root of wrong, 

Clearing a free way for the feet of God, 

The eyes of conscience testing every stroke, 

To make his deed the measure of a man. 

He built the rail-pile as he built the State, 

Pouring his splendid strength through every blow: 

The grip that swung the ax in Illinois 

Was on the pen that set a people free. 

So came the Captain with the mighty heart ; 
And when the judgment thunders split the house, 
Wrenching the rafters from their ancient rest, 
He held the ridgepole up, and spiked again 
The rafters of the Home. He held his place — 
Held the long purpose like a growing tree — 
Held on through blame and faltered not at praise. 
And when he fell in whirlwind, he went down 



56 Edwin Markham 

As when a lordly cedar, green with boughs, 
Goes down with a great shout upon the hills, 
And leaves a lonesome place against the sky. 



Irwin Russell 

Irwin Russell was born, June 3, 1853, at Port Gibson, Mis- 
sissippi, where he studied law and was admitted to the bar. 
His restless nature and wayward disposition drove him from 
one place to another, from a not too rugged health to an utter 
breakdown. 

Although Russell did not take his poetry seriously and though 
the bulk of it is small, its influence has been large. Thomas 
Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris have acknowledged 
their indebtedness to him; the creator of Uncle Remus writing, 
"Irwin Russell was among the first — if not the very first — of 
Southern writers to appreciate the literary possibilities of the 
negro character." He entered their life, appreciated their fresh 
turns of thought, saw things with that peculiar mixture of 
reverence and unconscious humor that is so integral a part of 
negro songs and spirituals. 

"De Fust Banjo" (from Russell's operetta Christmas- 
Night in the Quarters, possibly his best known work) is a 
faithful rendering of the mind of the old-fashioned, simple 
and sententious child of the plantation. In this poem the old 
story of Noah is told, with delightful additions, from the color- 
ful angle of the darky, local in its setting, diverting in its 
modern details and revealing in its quaint psychology. 

Russell died, in an obscure boarding house in New Orleans, 
December 23, 1879. 



DE FUST BANJO 

Go 'way, fiddle! folks is tired o' hearin' you a-squawkin'. 
Keep silence fur yo' betters! don't you heah de banjo 
talkin'? 



Irwin Russell 57 

About de 'possum's tail she's gwine to lecter — ladies, 

listen ! 
About de ha'r whut isn't dar, an' why de ha'r is missin' : 

"Dar's gwine to be a' oberflow," said Noah, lookin' 

solemn — 
Fur Noah tuk de "Herald," an' he read de ribber 

column — 
An' so he sot his hands to wuk a-clarin' timber-patches, 
An' 'lowed he's gwine to build a boat to beat de steamah 

Natchez, 

Ol' Noah kep' a-nailin' an' a-chippin' an' a-sawin'; 
An' all de wicked neighbors kep' a-laughin' an' a-pshawin' ; 
But Noah didn't min' 'em, knowin' whut wuz gwine to 

happen : 
An' forty days an' forty nights de rain it kep' a-drappin'. 

Now, Noah had done cotched a lot ob ebry sort o' 
beas'es — 

Ob all de shows a-trabbelin', it beat 'em all to pieces! 

He had a Morgan colt an' sebral head o' Jarsey cattle — 

An' druv 'em 'board de Ark as soon's he heered de thun- 
der rattle. 

Den sech anoder fall ob rain! It come so awful hebby, 

De ribber riz immejitly, an' busted troo de lebbee; 

De people all wuz drownded out — 'cep' Noah an' de 

critters, 
An' men he'd hired to wuk de boat — an' one to mix de 

bitters. 

De Ark she kep' a-sailin' an' a-sailin' an a-sailin' ; 
De lion got his dander up, an' like to bruk de palin' ; 



58 Irwin Russell 

De sarpints hissed; de painters yelled; tel', whut wid 

all de fussing 
You cVdn't hardly heah de mate a-bossin' roun , an* 

cussin , . 

Now Ham, de only nigger whut wuz runnin' on de 
packet, 

Got lonesome in de barber-shop, an' c'u'dn't stan' de 
racket ; 

An' so, fur to amuse he-se'f, he steamed some wood an' 
bent it, 

An' soon he had a banjo made — de fust dat wuz in- 
vented. 

He wet de ledder, stretched it on; made bridge an' 

screws an' aprin ; 
An' fitted in a proper neck — 'twuz berry long an' tap- 

rin' ; 
He tuk some tin, an' twisted him a thimble fur to ring 

it: 
An' den de mighty question riz: how wuz he gwine to 

string it? 

De 'possum had as fine a tail as dis dat I's a-singin' ; 
De ha'r's so long an' thick an' strong, — des fit fur banjo- 

stringin' ; 
Dat nigger shaved 'em off as short as washday-dinner 

graces : 
An' sorted ob 'em by de size — f'om little E's to basses. 

He strung her, tuned her, struck a jig, — 'twas "Nebber 

miri de wedder/' — 
She soun' like forty-lebben bands a-playin' all toged- 

der: 



Irwin Russell 59 

Some went to pattin' ; some to dancin' : Noah called de 

figgers ; 
An' Ham he sot an' knocked de tune, de happiest ob 

niggers ! 

Now, sence dat time — it's mighty strange — dere's not de 

slightes' showin' 
Ob any ha'r at all upon the 'possum's tail a-growin' ; 
An' curi's, too, dat nigger's ways — his people nebber 

los' 'em — 
Fur whar you finds de nigger — dar's de banjo an' de 

'possum ! 

Lizette Woodworth Reese 

Lizette Woodworth Reese was born January 9, 1856, at Balti- 
more, Maryland, where she has lived ever since. After an 
education obtained chiefly in private schools, she taught English 
in the Western High School at Baltimore. 

A Handful of Lavender (1891), A Quiet Road (1896) and 
A JV ay side Lute (1909) embody an artistry which, in spite of 
its old-fashioned contours, is as true as it is tender. A host 
of the younger lyricists owe much of their technique to her 
admirable models, and few modern sonneteers have equaled 
the blended music and symbolism of "Tears." 

TEARS 

When I consider Life and its few years — 

A wisp of fog betwixt us and the sun ; 

A call to battle, and the battle done 

Ere the last echo dies within our ears; 

A rose choked in the grass; an hour of fears; 

The gusts that past a darkening shore do beat ; 

The burst of music down an unlistening street, — 

I wonder at the idleness of tears. 



60 Lizette Woodworth Reese 

Ye old, old dead, and ye of yesternight, 
Chieftains, and bards, and keepers of the sheep, 
By every cup of sorrow that you had, 
Loose me from tears, and make me see aright 
How each hath back what once he stayed to weep : 
Homer his sight, David his little lad ! 



SPICEWOOD 

The spicewood burns along the gray, spent sky, 
In moist unchimneyed places, in a wind, 
That whips it all before, and all behind, 
Into one thick, rude flame, now low, now high. 
It is the first, the homeliest thing of all — 
At sight of it, that lad that by it fares, 
Whistles afresh his foolish, town-caught airs — 
A thing so honey-colored and so tall ! 

It is as though the young Year, ere he pass, 
To the white riot of the cherry tree, 
Would fain accustom us, or here, or there, 
To his new sudden ways with bough and grass, 
So starts with what is humble, plain to see, 
And all familiar as a cup, a chair. 



Frank Dempster Sherman 

Frank Dempster Sherman was born at Peekskill, New York, 
May 6, i860. He entered Columbia University in 1879, where, 
after graduation and a subsequent instructorship, he was made 
adjunct professor in 1891 and Professor of Graphics in 1904. 
He held the latter position until his death, which occurred 
September 19, 1916. 

Sherman never wearied of the little lyric; even the titles 



Frank Dempster Sherman 61 

of his volumes are instances of his fondness for the brief 
melody, the sudden snatch of song: Madrigals and Catches 
(1887), Lyrics for a Lute (1890), Little-Folk Lyrics (1892), 
Lyrics of Joy (1904). A sumptuous, collected edition of his 
poems was published, with an Introduction by Clinton Scollard, 
in 1917. 



AT MIDNIGHT 

See, yonder, the belfry tower 

That gleams in the moon's pale light- 
Or is it a ghostly flower 

That dreams in the silent night? 

I listen and hear the chime 
Go quavering over the town, 

And out of this flower of Time 
Twelve petals are wafted down. 



BACCHUS 

Listen to the tawny thief, 
Hid beneath the waxen leaf, 
Growling at his fairy host, 
Bidding her with angry boast 
Fill his cup with wine distilled 
From the dew the dawn has spilled: 
Stored away in golden casks 
Is the precious draught he asks. 

Who, — who makes this mimic din 
In this mimic meadow inn, 
Sings in such a drowsy note, 
Wears a golden-belted coat; 



62 Frank Dempster Sherman 

Loiters in the dainty room 
Of this tavern of perfume; 
Dares to linger at the cup 
Till the yellow sun is up? 

Bacchus 'tis, come back again 
To the busy haunts of men ; 
Garlanded and gaily dressed, 
Bands of gold about his breast; 
Straying from his paradise, 
Having pinions angel-wise, — 
'Tis the honey-bee, who goes 
Reveling within a rose! 



Louise Imogen Guiney 

Louise Imogen Guiney was born at Boston, Massachusetts, in 
1861. Although she attended Elmhurst Academy in Providence, 
most of her studying was with private tutors. In 1901 she went 
to England, where she lived until her death. 

Traditional in form and feeling, Miss Guiney's work has a 
distinctly personal vigor; even her earliest collection, The White 
Sail and Other Poems (1887), is not without individuality. 
Her two most characteristic volumes are A Roadside Harp 
(1893) and Patrins (1897). 

Miss Guiney died at Chirping-Camden, England, November 
3, 1920. 



THE WILD RIDE 

/ hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses, 
All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses, 
All night, from their stalls, the importunate pawing and 
neighing. 



Louise Imogen Guiney 63 

Let cowards and laggards fall back! But alert to the 

saddle 
Weatherworn and abreast, go men of our galloping 

legion, 
With a stirrup-cup each to the lily of women that loves 

him. 

The trail is through dolor and dread, over crags and 

morasses ; 
There are shapes by the way, there are things that appal 

or entice us: 
What odds? We are Knights of the Grail, we are 

vowed to the riding. 

Thought's self is a vanishing wing, and joy is a cobweb, 
And friendship a flower in the dust, and glory a sunbeam : 
Not here is our prize, nor, alas! after these our pursuing. 

A dipping of plumes, a tear, a shake of the bridle, 
A passing salute to this world and her pitiful beauty; 
We hurry with never a word in the track of our fathers. 

/ hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses. 
All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses, 
All night, from their stalls, the importunate pawing and 
neighing. 

We spur to a land of no name, outracing the storm-wind ; 
We leap to the infinite dark like sparks from the anvil. 
Thou leadest, O God! All's well with Thy troopers 



that follow. 



Bliss Carman 



(William) Bliss Carman was born at Fredericton, New 
Brunswick, Canada, April 15, 1861, of a long line of United 
Empire Loyalists who withdrew from Connecticut at the time 



6 4 



Bliss Carman 



of the Revolutionary War. Carman was educated at '.he Uni- 
versity of New Brunswick (1879-81), at Edinburgh (1082-3) 
and Harvard (1886-8). He took up his residence in the 
United States about 1889 ana \ with the exception of short so- 
journs in the Maritime Provinces, has lived there ever since. 

In 1893, Carman issued his first book, Low Tide on Grand 
Pre: A Book of Lyrics, It was immediately successful, running 
quickly into a second edition. A vivid buoyancy, new to 
American literature, made his worship of Nature frankly pagan 
as contrasted to the moralizing tributes of most of his prede- 
cessors. This freshness and irresponsible whimsy made Carman 
the natural collaborator for Richard Hovey, and when their 
first joint Songs from Vagabondia appeared in 1894, Carman's 
fame was established. (See Preface.) 

Although the three Vagabondia collections contain Carman's 
best known poems, several of his other volumes (he has pub- 
lished almost twenty of them) vibrate with the same glowing 
pulse. An almost physical radiance rises from Ballads of Lost 
Haven (1897), From the Book of Myths (1902) and Songs of 
the Sea Children (1904.). 

A VAGABOND SONG 

There is something in the autumn that is native to my 

blood — 
Touch of manner, hint of mood ; 
And my heart is like a rhyme, 
With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping 

time. 

The scarlet of the maples can shake me like a cry 

Of bugles going by. 

And my lonely spirit thrills 

To see the frosty asters like a smoke upon the hills. 

There is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir; 

We must rise and follow her, 

When from every hill of flame 

She calls and calls each vagabond by name. 



Bliss Carman 65 



HEM AND HAW 

Hem and Haw were the sons of sin, 
Created to shally and shirk; 
Hem lay 'round and Haw looked on 
While God did all the work. 

Hem was a fogy, and Haw was a prig, 
For both had the dull, dull mind ; 
And whenever they found a thing to do, 
They yammered and went it blind. 

Hem was the father of bigots and bores; 
As the sands of the sea were they. 
And Haw was the father of all the tribe 
Who criticize to-day. 

But God was an artist from the first, 
And knew what he was about; 
While over his shoulder sneered these two, 
And advised him to rub it out. 

They prophesied ruin ere man was made; 
"Such folly must surely fail!" 
And when he was done, "Do you think, my Lord, 
He's better without a tail?" 

And still in the honest working world, 
With posture and hint and smirk, 
These sons of the devil are standing by 
While man does all the work. 

They balk endeavor and baffle reform, 
In the sacred name of law; 
And over the quavering voice of Hem 
Is the droning voice of Haw. 



66 Bliss Carman 



DAISIES 

Over the shoulders and slopes of the dune 
I saw the white daisies go down to the sea, 
A host in the sunshine, an army in June, 
The people God sends us to set our hearts free. 

The bobolinks rallied them up from the dell, 
The orioles whistled them out of the wood; 
And all of their singing was, "Earth, it is well! ,, 
And all of their dancing was, "Life, thou art good!" 



Richard Burton 

Richard (Eugene) Burton was born at Hartford, Connecticut, 
March 14, 1861. He has taught English at various colleges 
and universities since 1888, and has been head of the English 
department of the University of Minnesota since 1906. 

His first book Dumb in June (1895), is, in many ways, his best. 
It contains a buoyant lyricism, a more conscious use of the strain 
developed in Carman and Hovey's Songs from Vagabondia. 
The succeeding Lyrics of Brotherhood (1899) has a wider 
vision if a more limited music; several of the poems in this 
collection reflect the hungers, dreams and unsung melodies 
of the dumb and defeated multitudes. 



BLACK SHEEP 

From their folded mates they wander far, 
Their ways seem harsh and wild; 

They follow the beck of a baleful star, 
Their paths are dream-beguiled. 



Richard Burton 67 

Vet haply they sought but a wider range, 

Some loftier mountain-slope, 
And little recked of the country strange 

Beyond the gates of hope. 

And haply a bell with a luring call 

Summoned their feet to tread 
Midst the cruel rocks, where the deep pitfall 

And the lurking snare are spread. 

Maybe, in spite of their tameless days 

Of outcast liberty, 
They're sick at heart for the homely ways 

Where their gathered brothers be. 

And oft at night, when the plains fall dark 

And the hills loom large and dim, 
For the Shepherd's voice they mutely hark, 

And their souls go out to him. 

Meanwhile, "Black sheep! Black sheep!" we cry, 

Safe in the inner fold; 
And maybe they hear, and wonder why, 

And marvel, out in the cold. 



Richard Hovey 

Richard Hovey was born in 1864 at Normal, Illinois, and 
graduated from Dartmouth in 1885. After leaving college, he 
became, in rapid succession, a theologian, an actor, a journalist, 
a lecturer, a professor of English literature at Barnard, a poet 
and a dramatist. 

His exuberant virility found its outlet in the series of poems 
published in collaboration with Bliss Carman — the three volumes 
of Songs from Vagabondia (1894, 1896, 1900). Here he let 



68 Richard Hovey 

himself go completely; nothing remained sober or static. His 
lines fling themselves across the page ; shout with a wild 
irresponsibility; leap, laugh, carouse and carry off the reader 
in a gale of high spirits. 

"At the Crossroads" is a vivid example of this gipsy-like 
spirit which could (as in "Unmanifest Destiny," written on the 
outbreak of the Spanish-American War) sound deeper notes 
with equal strength. The famous Stein Song is but an interlude 
in the midst of a far finer and even more rousing poem that, 
with its flavor of Whitman, begins: 

I said in my heart, "I am sick of four walls and a ceiling. 

I have need of the sky. 

I have business with the grass. 

I will up and get me away where the hawk is wheeling, 

Lone and high, 

And the slow clouds go by. 

I will get me away to the waters that glass 

The clouds as they pass. ..." 

Although the varied lyrics in Songs from Vagabondia are the 
best known examples of Hovey, a representative collection of 
his riper work may be found in Along the Trail (1898). 

Hovey died, during his thirty-sixth year, in 1900. 



AT THE CROSSROADS 

You to the left and I to the right, 

For the ways of men must sever — 

And it well may be for a day and a night, 

And it well may be forever. 

But whether we meet or whether we part 

(For our ways are past our knowing), 

A pledge from the heart to its fellow heart 

On the ways we all are going! 

Here's luck! 

For we know not where we are going. 



Richard Hovey 69 

Whether we win or whether we lose 

With the hands that life is dealing, 

It is not we nor the ways we choose 

But the fall of the cards that's sealing. 

There's a fate in love and a fate in fight, 

And the best of us all go under — 

And whether we're wrong or whether we're right, 

We win, sometimes, to our wonder. 

Here's luck! 

That we may not yet go under! 



With a steady swing and an open brow 

We have tramped the ways together, 

But we're clasping hands at the crossroads now 

In the Fiend's own night for weather; 

And whether we bleed or whether we smile 

In the leagues that lie before us 

The ways of life are many a mile 

And the dark of Fate is o'er us. 

Here's luck! 

And a cheer for the dark before us! 



You to the left and I to the right, 

For the ways of men must sever, 

And it well may be for a day and a night 

And it well may be forever! 

But whether we live or whether we die 

(For the end is past our knowing), 

Here's two frank hearts and the open sky, 

Be a fair or an ill wind blowing! 

Here's luck! 

In the teeth of all winds blowing. 



JO Richard Hovey 



UNMANIFEST DESTINY 

To what new fates, my country, far 
And unforeseen of foe or friend, 

Beneath what unexpected star 

Compelled to what unchosen end, 

Across the sea that knows no beach, 
The Admiral of Nations guides 

Thy blind obedient keels to reach 
The harbor where thy future rides! 

The guns that spoke at Lexington 

Knew not that God was planning then 

The trumpet word of Jefferson 
To bugle forth the rights of men. 

To them that wept and cursed Bull Run, 
What was it but despair and shame? 

Who saw behind the cloud the sun? 
Who knew that God was in the flame? 

Had not defeat upon defeat, 

Disaster on disaster come, 
The slaved emancipated feet 

Had never marched behind the drum. 

There is a Hand that bends our deeds 
To mightier issues than we planned; 

Each son that triumphs, each that bleeds, 
My country, serves It's dark command. 

I do not know beneath what sky 
Nor on what seas shall be thy fate; 

I only know it shall be high, 
I only know it shall be great. 



Richard Hovey 71 

A STEIN SONG 

(From "Spring") 

Give a rouse, then, in the A I ay time 

For a life that knows no fear! 
Turn night-time into daytime 
With the sunlight of good cheer! 
For it's always fair weather 
When good fellows get together, 
With a stein on the table and a good song 
ringing clear. 

When the wind comes up from Cuba, 

And the birds are on the wing, 
And our hearts are patting juba 
To the banjo of the spring, 

Then it's no wonder whether 
The boys will get together, 
With a stein on the table and a cheer for 
everything. 

For we're all frank-and-twenty 
When the spriri^-4s-ifrtrie air; 
And we've faith and hope a-plenty, 
And we've life and love to spare : 
And it's birds of a feather 
When we all get together, 
With a stein on the table and a heart with- 
out a care. 

For we know the world is glorious, 

And the goal a golden thing, 
And that God is not censorious 

When his children have their fling; 



72 Richard Hovey 

And life slips its tether 
When the boys get together, 
With a stein on the table in the fellowship 
of spring. 



Madison Cawein 

Madison (Julius) Cawein was born in Louisville, Kentucky, 
in 1865, and spent most of his life in the state of his birth. He 
wrote an enormous quantity of verse, publishing more than 
twenty volumes of pleasant, sometimes exuberant but seldom 
distinguished poetry. Lyrics and Idyls (1890) and Vale of 
Tempe (1905) contain his most characteristic stanzas, packed 
with an adjectival love of Nature that led certain of his 
admirers to call him (and, one must admit, the alliteration 
was tempting) "the Keats of Kentucky. ,, 

Cawein died in Kentucky in 1914. 



SNOW 

The moon, like a round device 
On a shadowy shield of war, 
Hangs white in a heaven of ice 
With a solitary star. 

The wind has sunk to a sigh, 
And the waters are stern with frost; 
And gray, in the eastern sky, 
The last snow-cloud is lost. 

White fields, that are winter-starved, 
Black woods, that are winter-fraught, 
Cold, harsh, as a face death-carved, 
With the iron of some black thought. 



Madison C awe in 73 



DESERTED 

The old house leans upon a tree 
Like some old man upon a staff: 

The night wind in its ancient porch 
Sounds like a hollow laugh. 

The heaven is wrapped in flying clouds 
As grandeur cloaks itself in gray: 

The starlight flitting in and out, 
Glints like a lanthorn ray. 

The dark is full of whispers. Now 

A fox-hound howls: and through the night, 

Like some old ghost from out its grave, 
The moon comes misty white. 



William Vaughn Moody 

William Vaughn Moody was born at Spencer, Indiana, July 
1, 1869, and was educated at Harvard. After graduation, he 
spent the remaining eighteen years of his life in travel and in- 
tensive study — he taught, for eight years, at the University of 
Chicago — his death coming at the very height of his creative 
power. 

The Masque of Judgment, his first work, was published in 
1900. A richer and more representative collection appeared the 
year following; in Poems (1901) Moody effected that mingling 
of challenging lyricism and spiritual philosophy which becomes 
more and more insistent. (See Preface.) Throughout his 
career, particularly in such lines as the hotly expostulating 
"On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines" Moody successfully 
achieves the rare union of poet and preacher. A complete 
edition of The Poems and Poetic Dramas of William Vaughn 
Moody was published in 1912 in two volumes. 



74 William Vaughn Moody 

In the summer of 1909 Moody was stricken with the illness 
from which he never recovered. He died in October, 1910. 



ON A SOLDIER FALLEN IN THE PHILIPPINES 

Streets of the roaring town, 

Hush for him ; hush, be still ! 

He comes, who was stricken down 

Doing the word of our will. 

Hush! Let him have his state. 

Give him his soldiers crown, 

The grists of trade can wait 

Thefr grinding at the mill. 
But he cannot wait for his honor, now the trumpet has 

been blown. 
Wreathe pride now for his granite brow, lay love on 
his breast of stone. 

Toll! Let the great bells toll 

Till the clashing air is dim, 

Did we wrong this parted soul? 

We will make it up to him. 

Toll! Let him never guess 

What work we sent him to. 

Laurel, laurel, yes. 

He did what we bade him do. 
Praise, and never a whispered hint but the fight he 

fought was good ; 
Never a word that the blood on his sword was his coun- 
try's own heart's-blood. 

A flag for a soldier's bier 

Who dies that his land may live ; 

O banners, banners here, 

That he doubt not nor misgive! 



William Vaughn Moody 75 

That he heed not from the tomb 
The evil days draw near 
When the nation robed in gloom 
With its faithless past shall strive. 
Let him never dream that his bullet's scream went wide 

of its island mark, 
Home to the heart of his darling land where she stumbled 
and sinned in the dark. 

George Sterling 

George Sterling was born at Sag Harbor, New York, De- 
cember 1, 1869, and educated at various private schools in the 
Eastern States. He moved to the far West about 1895 and has 
lived in California ever since. 

Of Sterling's ten volumes of poetry, A Wine of Wizardry 
(1908) and The House of Orchids and Other Poems (1911) 
are the most characteristic. 

THE BLACK VULTURE 

Aloof upon the day's immeasured dome, 

He holds unshared the silence of the sky. 

Far down his bleak, relentless eyes descry 
The eagle's empire and the falcon's home — 
Far down, the galleons of sunset roam ; 

His hazards on the sea of morning lie; 

Serene, he hears the broken tempest sigh 
Where cold sierras gleam like scattered foam. 

And least of all he holds the human swarm — 
Unwitting now that envious men prepare 
To make their dream and its fulfillment one, 
When, poised above the caldrons of the storm, 
Their hearts, contemptuous of death, shall dare 
His roads between the thunder and the sun. 



j6 Edwin Arlington Robinson 



Edwin Arlington Robinson was born December 22, 1869, in 
the village of Head Tide, Maine. When he was still a child, 
the Robinson family moved to the nearby town of Gardiner, 
which figures prominently in Robinson's poetry as "Tilbury 
Town." In 1891 he entered Harvard College. A little col- 
lection of verse was privately printed in 1896 and the follow- 
ing year marked the appearance of his first representative work, 
The Children of the Night (1897). 

Somewhat later, he was struggling in various capacities 
to make a living in New York, five years passing before the 
publication of Captain Craig. In 1910, he published a series 
of short poems, The Town Down the River. The Man Against 
the Sky, Robinson's fullest and most penetrating work, appeared 
in 1916. (See Preface.) 

In all of these books there is manifest that searching for 
truth; the constant questioning, that takes the place of mere 
acceptance. As the work of a native portrait painter, nothing, 
with the exception of some of Frost's pictures, has been pro- 
duced that is at once so keen and so kindly; in the half-cynical, 
half-mystical etchings like "Miniver Cheevy," and "Richard 
Cory" — lines where Robinson's irony is inextricably mixed with 
tenderness — his art is at its height. His splendid "The Master," 
one of the finest evocations of Lincoln, is, at the same time, a 
bitter^ commentary on the commercialism of the times and the 
"shopman's test of age and worth." 

Although he is often accused of holding a negative attitude 
toward life, Robinson's philosophy is essentially positive; a 
dogged if never dogmatic desire for a deeper faith, a greater 
light is his. It is a philosophy expressed in Captain Craig: 

. . . Take on yourself 
But your sincerity, and you take on 
Good promise for all climbing; fly for truth 
And hell shall have no storm to crush your flight, 
No laughter to vex down your loyalty. 

A one-volume edition of Robinson's Collected Poems appeared 
in 1 921, revealing his vigorous intellect and chaste economy 
of speech, his delicate intuition and dramatic characterizations. 



Edwin Arlington Robinson *JJ 



MINIVER CHEEVY 1 

Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn, 

Grew lean while he assailed the seasons; 

He wept that he was ever born, 
And he had reasons. 

Miniver loved the days of old 

When swords were bright and steeds were prancing; 
The vision of a warrior bold 

Would set him dancing. 

Miniver sighed for what was not, 

And dreamed, and rested from his labors; 

He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot, 
And Priam's neighbors. 

Miniver mourned the ripe renown 

That made so many a name so fragrant ; 

He mourned Romance, now on the town, 
And Art, a vagrant. 

Miniver loved the Medici, 

Albeit he had never seen one; 
He would have sinned incessantly 

Could he have been one. 

Miniver cursed the commonplace 

And eyed a khaki suit with loathing ; 
He missed the mediaeval grace 

Of iron clothing. 

1 Reprinted by permission of the publishers, Charles Scribner's 
Sons, from The Town down the River by E. A. Robinson. 



yS Edwin Arlington Robinson 

Miniver scorned the gold he sought, 
But sore annoyed was he without it; 

Miniver thought, and thought, and thought, 
And thought about it. 

Miniver Cheevy, born too late, 

Scratched his head and kept on thinking; 

Miniver coughed, and called it fate, 
And kept on drinking. 



THE MASTER* 1 

{Lincoln as seen, presumably, by one of his contemporaries, 
shortly after the Civil War) 

A flying word from here and there 
Had sown the name at which we sneered, 
But soon the name was everywhere, 
To be reviled and then revered: 
A presence to be loved and feared, 
We cannot hide it, or deny 
That we, the gentlemen who jeered, 
May be forgotten by and by. 

He came when days were perilous 

And hearts of men were sore beguiled; 

And having made his note of us, 

He pondered and was reconciled. 

Was ever master yet so mild 

As he, and so untamable? 

We doubted, even when he smiled, 

Not knowing what he knew so well. 

* See pages 54, 84, 139, 142, 172. 

1 Reprinted by permission of the publishers, Charles Scribner's 
Sons, from The Town down the River by E. A. Robinson. 



Edwin Arlington Robinson 79 

He knew that undeceiving fate 

Would shame us whom he served unsought; 

He knew that he must wince and wait — 

The jest of those for whom he fought; 

He knew devoutly what he thought 

Of us and of our ridicule; 

He knew that we must all be taught 

Like little children in a school. 

We gave a glamour to the task 

That he encountered and saw through, 

But little of us did he ask, 

And little did we ever do. 

And what appears if we review 

The season when we railed and chaffed ? 

It is the face of one who knew 

That we were learning while we laughed. 

The face that in our vision feels 
Again the venom that we flung, 
Transfigured to the world reveals 
The vigilance to which we clung. 
Shrewd, hallowed, harassed, and among 
The mysteries that are untold, 
The face we see was never young, 
Nor could it ever have been old. 

For he, to whom we have applied 
Our shopman's test of age and worth, 
Was elemental when he died, 
As he was ancient at his birth : 
The saddest among kings of earth, 
Bowed with a galling crown, this man 
Met rancor with a cryptic mirth, 
Laconic — and Olympian. 



80 Edwin Arlington Robinson 

The love, the grandeur, and the fame 
Are bounded by the world alone; 
The calm, the smouldering, and the flame 
Of awful patience were his own: 
With him they are forever flown 
Past all our fond self-shadowings, 
Wherewith we cumber the Unknown 
As with inept Icarian wings. 



For we were not as other men : 
'Twas ours to soar and his to see. 
But we are coming down again, 
And we shall come down pleasantly; 
Nor shall we longer disagree 
On what it is to be sublime, 
But flourish in our perigee 
And have one Titan at a time. 



AN OLD STORY 1 

Strange that I did not know him then, 

That friend of mine! 
I did not even show him then 

One friendly sign; 

But cursed him for the ways he had 

To make me see 
My envy of the praise he had 

For praising me. 

1 Reprinted by permission of the publishers, Charles Scribner's 
Sons, from The Children of the Night, 



Edwin Arlington Robinson 8l 

I would have rid the earth of him 

Once, in my pride! . . . 
I never knew the worth of him 

Until he died. 



THE DARK HILLS 

Dark hills at evening in the west, 
Where sunset hovers like a sound 
Of golden horns that sang to rest 
Old bones of warriors under ground, 
Far now from all the bannered ways 
Where flash the legions of the sun, 
You fade — as if the last of days 
Were fading, and all wars were done. 

RICHARD CORY x 

Whenever Richard Cory went down town, 
We people on the pavement looked at him: 

He was a gentleman from sole to crown, 
Clean favored, and imperially slim. 

And he was always quietly arrayed, 

And he was always human when he talked ; 

But still he fluttered pulses when he said, 

"Good-morning," and he glittered when he 
walked. 

And he was rich — yes, richer than a king, 
And admirably schooled in every grace : 

In fine, we thought that he was everything 
To make us wish that we were in his place. 

1 Reprinted by permission of the publishers, Charles Scribner's 
Sons, from The Children of the Night. 



82 Edwin Arlington Robinson 

So on we worked, and waited for the light, 
And went without the meat, and cursed the 
bread ; 

And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, 
Went home and put a bullet through his head. 



Edgar Lee Masters 

Edgar Lee Masters was born at Garnett, Kansas, August 23, 
1869, of old Puritan and pioneering stock. When he was still 
a boy, the family moved to Illinois, where, after desultory 
schooling, he studied law in his father's office at Lewiston. 
For a year he practised with his father and then went to 
Chicago, where he became a successful and prominent attorney. 

Before going to Chicago, Masters had composed a great quan- 
tity of verse in traditional forms on still more traditional 
themes; by the time he was twenty-four he had written about 
four hundred poems, revealing the result of wide reading and 
betraying the influence of Poe, Keats, Shelley and Swinburne. 
His work, previous to the publication of Spoon River Anthology, 
was derivative and undistinguished. 

Taking as his model The Greek Anthology, which his friend 
William Marion Reedy had pressed upon him, in 1914 Masters 
evolved Spoon River Anthology, that astonishing assemblage of 
over two hundred self-inscribed epitaphs, in which the dead 
of a middle Western town are supposed to have written the 
truth about themselves. Through these frank revelations, 
many of them interrelated, the village is recreated for us; 
it lives again, unvarnished and typical, with all its intrigues, 
hypocrisies, feuds, martyrdoms and occasional exaltations. The 
monotony of existence in a drab township, the defeat of ideals, 
the struggle toward higher goals — all is synthesized in these 
crowded pages. All moods and all manner of voices are heard 
here — even Masters's, who explains the reason for his medium 
and the selection of his form through "Petit, the Poet." 

Starved Rock (1919), Domesday Book (1920) and The Open 
Sea (1921) are, like all Masters's later books, queerly assembled 
mixtures of good, bad and derivative verse. And yet, for all 
of this poet's borrowings, in spite of his cynicism and disillusion, 



Edgar Lee Masters 83 

Masters's work is a continual searching for some key to the 
mystery of truth, the mastery of life. 



PETIT, THE POET 1 

Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick, 

Tick, tick, tick, like mites in a quarrel — 

Faint iambics that the full breeze wakens — 

But the pine tree makes a symphony thereof. 

Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus, 

Ballades by the score with the same old thought: 

The snows and the roses of yesterday are vanished ; 

And what is love but a rose that fades? 

Life all around me here in the village : 

Tragedy, comedy, valor and truth, 

Courage, constancy, heroism, failure — 

All in the loom, and, oh, what patterns! 

Woodlands, meadows, streams and rivers — 

Blind to all of it all my life long. 

Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus, 

Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick, 

Tick, tick, tick, what little iambics, 

While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines! 



LUCINDA MATLOCK 1 

I went to the dances at Chandlerville, 

And played snap-out at Winchester. 

One time we changed partners, 

Driving home in the moonlight of middle June, 

1 Reprinted by permicsion of the publishers, The Macmillan 
Company, from Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. 



84 Edgar Lee Masters 

And then I found Davis. 

We were married and lived together for seventy years, 

Enjoying, working, raising the twelve children, 

Eight of whom we lost 

Ere I had reached the age of sixty. 

I spun, I wove, I kept the house, I nursed the sick, 

I made the garden, and for holiday 

Rambled over the fields where sang the larks, 

And by Spoon River gathering many a shell, 

And many a flower and medicinal weed — 

Shouting to the wooded hills, singing to the green valleys. 

At ninety-six I had lived enough, that is all, 

And passed to a sweet repose. 

What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness, 

Anger, discontent and drooping hopes? 

Degenerate sons and daughters, 

Life is too strong for you — 

It takes life to love Life. 



ANNE RUTLEDGE * * 

Out of me unworthy and unknown 

The vibrations of deathless music; 

"With malice toward none, with charity for all." 

Out of me the forgiveness of millions toward millions, 

And the beneficent face of a nation 

Shining with justice and truth. 

I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds, 

Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln, 

Wedded to him, not through union, 

*See pages 54, 78, 139, 142, 172. 

1 Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The Macmillan 
Company, from Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. 



Edgar Lee Masters 85 

But through separation. 
Bloom forever, O Republic, 
From the dust of my bosom! 



Stephen Crane 

Stephen Crane, whose literary career was one of the most 
meteoric in American letters, was born at Newark, New Jersey, 
November i, 1871. After taking a partial course at Lafayette 
College, he entered journalism at sixteen and, until the time of 
his death, was a reporter and writer of newspaper sketches. 
When he died, at the age of thirty, he had produced ten 
printed volumes (one of which, The Red Badge of Courage, is 
a classic among descriptive novels), two more announced for 
publication and two others which were appearing serially. 

At various periods in Crane's brief career, he experimented 
in verse, seeking to find new effects in unrhymed lines for 
his acuteness of vision. The results were embodied in 
two volumes of unusual poetry, The Black Riders (1895) and 
War Is Kind (1899) ; lines that anticipated the Imagists and 
the epigrammatic free verse that followed fifteen years later. 

It is more than probable that his feverish energy of pro- 
duction aggravated the illness that caused Crane's death. He 
reached his refuge in the Black Forest only to die at the 
journey's end, June 5, 1900. 



I SAW A MAN 

I saw a man pursuing the horizon; 

Round and round they sped. 

I was disturbed at this; 

I accosted the man. 

"It is futile," I said, 

"You can never" — 

"You lie," he cried, 
And ran on. 



86 Stephen Crane 

THE WAYFARER 

The wayfarer, 

Perceiving the pathway to truth, 

Was struck with astonishment. 

It was thickly grown w T ith weeds. 

"Ha," he said, 

"I see that no one has passed here 

In a long time." 

Later he saw that each weed. 

Was a singular knife. 

"Well," he mumbled at last, 

"Doubtless there are other roads." 

THE BLADES OF GRASS 

In Heaven, 

Some little blades of grass 

Stood before God. 

"What did you do?" 

Then all save one of the little blades 

Began eagerly to relate 

The merits of their lives. 

This one stayed a small way behind, 

Ashamed. 

Presently, God said, 

"And what did you do?" 

The little blade answered, "Oh, my Lord, 

Memory is bitter to me, 

For, if I did good deeds, 

I know not of them." 

Then God, in all his splendor, 

Arose from his throne. 

"Oh, best little blade of grass!" he said. 



T. A. Daly 87 



Thomas Augustine Daly was born in Philadelphia, Penn- 
sylvania, May 28, 1871. He attended Villanova College and 
Fordham University (1889), leaving there at the end of his 
sophomore year to become a newspaper man. 

Canzoni (1906) and Carmina (1909) contain the best-known 
of Daly's varied dialect verses. Although he has written in 
half a dozen different idioms including "straight'' English 
{vide Songs of Wedlock, 1916), his half-humorous, half- 
pathetic interpretations of the Irish and Italian immigrants are 
his forte. 



THE SONG OF THE THRUSH 

Ah ! the May was grand this mornin , ! 

Shure, how could I feel forlorn in 

Such a land, when tree and flower tossed 

their kisses to the breeze? 
Could an Irish heart be quiet 
While the Spring was runnin' riot, 

An' the birds of free America were singin' in the trees? 
In the songs that they were singin' # 

No familiar note was ringing 

But I strove to imitate them an' I whistled like a la5. 
Oh, my heart was warm to love them 
For the very newness of them — 

For the ould songs that they helped me to forget — an' 
I w T as glad. 

So I mocked the feathered choir 

To my hungry heart's desire, 

An' I gloried in the comradeship that made 

their joy my own. 
Till a new note sounded, stillin' 
All the rest. A thrush was trillin' ! 



88 T. A. Daly 

Ah! the thrush I left behind me in the fields about 
Athlone ! 
Where, upon the whitethorn swayin', 
He was minstrel of the Mayin', 
In my days of love an' laughter that the years have laid 
at rest ; 
Here again his notes were ringm' ! 
But I'd lost the heart for singin' — 
Ah! the song I could not answer was the one I knew 
the best. 



MIA CARLOTTA 

Giuseppe, da barber, ees greata for "mash," 

He gotta da bigga, da blacka mustache, 

Good clo'es an' good styla an' playnta good cash. 

W'enevra Giuseppe ees walk on da street, 
Da peopla dey talka, "how nobby! how neat! 
How softa da handa, how smalla da feet." 

He raisa hees hat an' he shaka hees curls, 
An' smila weeth teetha so shiny like pearls; 
O ! many da heart of da seelly young girls 

He gotta — 
Yes, playnta he gotta — 

But notta 

Carlotta ! 

Giuseppe, da barber, he maka da eye, 
An' lika da steam engine puffa an' sigh, 
For catcha Carlotta w'en she ees go by. 



T. A. Daly 89 

Carlotta she walka weeth nose in da air, 

An' look through Giuseppe weeth far-away stare, 

As eef she no see dere ees som'body dere. 

Giuseppe, da barber, he gotta da cash, 
He gotta da clo'es an' da bigga mustache, 
He gotta da seelly young girls for da "mash," 

But notta — 
You bat my life, notta — 

Carlotta. 

I gotta! 



Paul Laurence Dunbar 

Paul Laurence Dunbar was born in 1872 at Dayton, Ohio, 
the son of negro slaves. He was, before and after he began 
to write his interpretative verse, an elevator-boy. He tried 
newspaper work unsuccessfully and, in 1899, was given a 
minor position in the Library of Congress at Washington, D. C. 

Dunbar's first collection, Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896), contains 
many of his most characteristic poems. In an introduction, in 
which mention was made of the octoroon Dumas and the great 
Russian poet Pushkin, who was a mulatto, William Dean 
Howells wrote, "So far as I can remember, Paul Dunbar was 
the only man of pure African blood and of American civilization 
to feel the negro life aesthetically and express it lyrically. . . . 
His brilliant and unique achievement was to have studied the 
American negro objectively, and to have represented him as he 
found him." Lyrics of the Hearthside (1899) and Lyrics of 
Love and Laughter (1903) are two other volumes full of folk- 
stuff. 

Dunbar died in the city of his birth, Dayton, Ohio, February 
10, 1906. 



^t- 



90 Paul Laurence Dunbar 



THE TURNING OF THE BABIES IN THE BED 1 

Woman's sho' a cur'ous critter, an' dey ain't no doubtin' 

dat. 
She's a mess o' funny capahs f om huh slippahs to huh 

hat. 
Ef yo' tries to un'erstan' huh, an' yo' fails, des' up an' 

say: 
"D' ain't a bit o' use to try to un'erstan' a woman's way." 



I don' mean to be complainin', but I's jes' a-settin' down 
Some o' my own obserwations, w'en I cas' my eye eroun'. 
Ef yo' ax me fu' to prove it, I ken do it mighty fine, 
Fu' dey ain't no bettah 'zample den dis ve'y wife o' mine. 

In de ve'y hea't o' midnight, w'en I's sleepin' good an* 

soun', 
I kin hyeah a so't o' rustlin' an' somebody movin' 'roun'. 
An' I say, "Lize, whut yo' doin'?" But she frown an' 

shek huh haid, 
"Hesh yo' mouf, I's only tu'nin' of de chillun in de bed. 

"Don' yo' know a chile gits restless, layin' all de night 

one way? 
An' yo' got to kind o' 'range him sev'al times befo' de 

day? 
So de little necks won't worry, an' de little backs won't 

break; 
Don' yo' t'ink 'cause chillun's chillun dey haint got no 

pain an' ache." 



1 From Lyrics of Love and Laughter. Copyright, 1903, by 
Dodd, Mead & Company. 



Paul Laurence Dunbar 91 

So she shakes 'em, an' she twists 'em, an' she tu'ns 'em 

'roun' erbout, 
'Twell I don' see how de chillun evah keeps f ' om hollahin' 

out. 
Den she lif s 'em up head down'ards, so's dey won't git 

livah-growm, 
But dey snoozes des' ez peaceful ez a liza'd on a stone. 

Wen hit's mos' nigh time fu' wakin' on de dawn 0" 

jedgement day, 
Seems lak I kin hyeah ol' Gab'iel lay his trumpet down 

an' say, 
"Who dat w r alkin' 'roun' so easy, down on earf ermong 

de dead?"— 
'T will be Lizy up a-tu'nin' of de chillun in de bed. 

A COQUETTE CONQUERED » 



'• 



Yes, my ha't's ez ha'd ez stone — 
Go 'way, Sam, an' lemme 'lone. 
No ; I ain't gwine change my min' ; 
Ain't gwine ma'y you — nuffin' de kin\ 

Phiny loves you true an' deah? 
Go ma'y Phiny; whut I keer? 
Oh, you needn't mou'n an' cry — 
I don't keer how soon you die. 

Got a present! Whut yo' got? 
Somef'n fu' de pan er pot! 
Huh! Yo' sass do sholy beat — 
Think I don't git 'nough to eat? 

1 From Lyrics of Lowly Life. Copyright, 1896, by Dodd, 
Mead & Company. 



92 Paul Laurence Dunbar 

Whut's dat un'neaf yo' coat? 
Looks des lak a little shoat. 
'Tain't no possum? Bless de Lamb! 
Yes, it is, you rascal, Sam! 

Gin it to me; whut you say? 
Ain't you sma't now! Oh, go 'way! 
Possum do look mighty nice; 
But you ax too big a price. 

Tell me, is you talkin' true, 

Dat's de gal's whut ma'ies you? 

Come back, Sam; now whah's you gwine? 

Co'se you knows dat possum's mine! 



Guy Wetmore Carryl 

Guy Wetmore Carryl, son of Charles Edward Carryl (see 
page 43), was born in New York City, March 4, 1873. He 
graduated from Columbia University in 1895, was editor of 
Munsey's Magazine, 1895-6, and, during the time he lived 
abroad (from 1897 to 1902), was the foreign representative 
of various American publications. 

Inheriting a remarkable technical gift from his father, young 
Carryl soon surpassed him as well as all other rivals in the 
held of brilliantly rhymed, brilliantly turned burlesques. Al- 
though he wrote several serious poems (the best of which have 
been collected in the posthumously published The Garden of 
Years, 1904), Carryl's most characteristic work is to be found 
in his perversions of the parables of y£sop, Fables for the Frivo- 
lous (1898), the topsy-turvy interpretations of old nursery 
rhymes, Mother Goose for Grownups (1900) and his fantastic 
variations on the fairy tales in Griwm Tales Made Gay (1903) 
— all of them with a surprising (and punning) Moral attached. 

This extraordinary versifier died, before reaching the height 
of his power, at the age of thirty-one, in the summer of 1904. 



\ 

Guy Wetmore Carryl 93 

THE SYCOPHANTIC FOX AND THE 
GULLIBLE RAVEN 

A raven sat upon a tree, 

And not a word he spoke, for 
Hfs beak contained a piece of Brie, 
Or, maybe, it was Roquefort. 

We'll make it any kind you please — 
At all events it was a cheese. 

Beneath the tree's umbrageous limb 

A hungry fox sat smiling; 
He saw the raven watching him, 
And spoke in words beguiling: 

"J'admire" said he, "ton beau plumage,' 9 
(The which was simply persiflage.) 

Two things there are, no doubt you know, 

To which a fox is used: 
A rooster that is bound to crow, 
A crow that's bound to roost; 
And whichsoever he espies 
He tells the most unblushing lies. 

"Sweet fowl," he said, "I understand 

You're more than merely natty, 
I hear you sing to beat the band 
And Adelina Patti. 

Pray render with your liquid tongue 
A bit from 'Gotterdammerung.' " 

This subtle speech was aimed to please 

The crow, and it succeeded ; 
He thought no bird in all the trees 

Could sing as well as he did. 



94 Guy Wetmore Carryl 

In flattery completely doused, 

He gave the "Jewel Song" from "Faust." 

But gravitation's law, of course, 

As Isaac Newton showed it, 
Exerted on the cheese its force, 

And elsewhere soon bestowed it. 
In fact, there is no need to tell 
What happened when to earth it fell. 

I blush to add that when the bird 

Took in the situation 
He said one brief, emphatic word, 
Unfit for publication. 

The fox was greatly startled, but 
He only sighed and answered "Tut." 

The Moral is : A fox is bound 
To be a shameless sinner. 
And also: When the cheese comes round 
You know it's after dinner. 

But (what is only known to few) 
The fox is after dinner, too. 



HOW JACK FOUND THAT BEANS MAY GO 
BACK ON A CHAP 

Without the slightest basis 
For hypochondriasis, 

A widow had forebodings which a cloud around her 
flung, 
And with expression cynical 
For half the day a clinical 

Thermometer she held beneath her tongue. 



Guy Wetmore Carryl 95 

Whene'er she read the papers 
She suffered from the vapors, 

At every tale of malady or accident she'd groan; 
In every new and smart disease, 
From housemaid's knee to heart disease, 

She recognized the symptoms as her own! 

She had a yearning chronic 
To try each novel tonic, 

Elixir, panacea, lotion, opiate, and balm; 
And from a homeopathist 
Would change to an hydropathist, 

And back again, with stupefying calm! 

She was nervous, cataleptic, 
And anemic, and dyspeptic: 

Though not convinced of apoplexy, yet she had her 
fears. 
She dwelt with force fanatical, 
Upon a twinge rheumatical, 

And said she had a buzzing in her ears! 

Now all of this bemoaning 

And this grumbling and this groaning 

The mind of Jack, her son and heir, unconscionably 
bored. 
His heart completely hardening, 
He gave his time to gardening, 

For raising beans was something he adored. 

Each hour in accents morbid 
This limp maternal bore bid 

Her callous son affectionate and lachrymose good-bys. 
She never granted Jack a day 
Without some long "Alackaday!" 

Accompanied by rolling of the eyes. 



96 Guy Wetmore Carryl 

But Jack, no panic showing, 

Just watched his beanstalk growing, 

And twined with tender fingers the tendrils up the 
pole. 
At all her words funereal 
He smiled a smile ethereal, 

Or sighed an absent-minded "Bless my soul!" 



That hollow-hearted creature 
Would never change a feature: 

No tear bedimmed his eye, however touching was her 
talk. 
She never fussed or flurried him, 
The only thing that worried him 

Was when no bean-pods grew upon the stalk! 

But then he wabbled loosely 
His head, and wept profusely, 

And, taking out his handkerchief to mop away his 
tears, 
Exclaimed: "It hasn't got any!" 
He found this blow to botany 

Was sadder than were all his mother's fears. 



The Moral is that gardeners pine 
Whene'er no pods adorn the vine. 
Of all sad words experience gleans 
The saddest are: "It might have beans. 1 
( I did not make this up myself : 
'Twas in a book upon my shelf. 
It's witty, but I don't deny 
It's rather Whittier than I!) 



H. H. Knibbs 97 

Harry Herbert Knibbs was born at Niagara Falls, October 24, 
1874. After a desultory schooling, he actended Harvard for 
three years when he was thirty-four. '"Somebody said I took 
honors in English," says Knibbs, "but I never saw them." He 
wrote his first book, Lost Farm Camp, a novel, as a class 
exercise. In 1911, Knibbs settled in Los Angeles, California, 
where he has lived ever since. 

In Riders of the Stars (191 6) and Songs of the Trail (1920), 
Knibbs carries on the tradition of Bret Harte and the Pike 
County Ballads. High-hearted verse this is, with more than 
an occasional flash of poetry. To the typical Western breezi- 
ness, Knibbs adds a wider whimsicality, a rough-shod but 
nimble imagination. 

THE VALLEY THAT GOD FORGOT 

Out in the desert spaces, edged by a hazy blue, 
Davison sought the faces of the long-lost friends he 
knew: 

They were there, in the distance dreaming 

Their dreams that were worn and old ; 

They were there, to his frenzied seeming, 

Still burrowing down for gold. 

Davison's face was leather; his mouth was a swollen 

blot, 
His mind was a floating feather, in The Valley That 
God Forgot; 
Wild as a dog gone loco, 
Or sullen or meek, by turns, 
He mumbled a "Poco! Poco!" 
And whispered of pools and ferns. 
Gold! Why his, for the finding! But water was never 

found, 
Save in deep caverns winding miles through the under- 
ground : 



98 H. H. Knibbs 

Cool, far, shadowy places 
Edged by the mirrored trees, 
When — Davison saw the faces! 
And fear let loose his knees. 

There was Shorty who owed him money, and Billing 

who bossed the crowd ; 
And Steve whom the boys called "Sunny," and Collins 
who talked so loud: 
Miguel with the handsome daughter, 
And the rustler, Ed McCray; 
Five — and they begged for water, 
And offered him gold, in pay. 

Gold? It was never cheaper. And Davison shook his 

head: 
"The price of a drink is steeper out here than in town," 
he said. 
He laughed as they mouthed and muttered 
Through lips that were cracked and dried; 
The pulse in his ear-drum fluttered: 
"I'm through with the game!" he cried. 

"I'm through!" And he knelt and fumbled the cap of 

his dry canteen 
Then, rising, he swayed and stumbled into a black 
ravine : 
His ghostly comrades followed, 
For Davison's end was near, 
And a shallow grave they hollowed, 
When up from it, cool and clear 

Bubbled the water — hidden a pick-stroke beneath the 

sand ; 
Davison, phantom-ridden, scooped with a shaking 

hand . . . 



H. H. Knibbs 99 

Davison swears they made it, 
The Well where we drank today. 
Davison's game? He played it 
And won — so the town-folk say: 

Called it, The Morning-Glory — near those abandoned 

stamps, 
And Davison's crazy story was told in a hundred camps: 

Time and the times have tamed it, 

His yarn — and this desert spot, 

But I'm strong for the man who named it, 

The Valley That God Forgot. 



Anna Hempstead Branch 

Anna Hempstead Branch was born at New London, Con- 
necticut. She graduated from Smith College in 1897 an d nas 
devoted herself to literature ever since. 

Her two chief volumes, The Shoes That Danced (1905) and 
Rose of the Wind (1910), show a singer who is less fanciful 
than philosophic. Her lines are admirably condensed, rich in 
personal value as well as poetic revelation; they maintain a 
high and austere level. A typical poem, ''The Monk in the 
Kitchen," with its spiritual loveliness and verbal felicity, is 
a celebration of cleanness that gives order an almost mystical 
nobility. 



THE MONK IN THE KITCHEN 



Order is a lovely thing; 
On disarray it lays its wing, 
Teaching simplicity to sing. 
It has a meek and lowly grace, 



ioo Anna Hempstead Branch 

Quiet as a nun's face. 

Lo — I will have thee in this place! 

Tranquil well of deep delight, 

All things that shine through thee appear 

As stones through water, sweetly clear. 

Thou clarity, 

That with angelic charity 

Revealest beauty where thou art, 

Spread thyself like a clean pool. 

Then all the things that in thee are, 

Shall seem more spiritual and fair, 

Reflection from serener air — 

Sunken shapes of many a star 

In the high heavens set afar. 



II 

Ye stolid, homely, visible things, 
Above you all brood glorious wings 
Of your deep entities, set high, 
Like slow moons in a hidden sky. 
But you, their likenesses, are spent 
Upon another element. 
Truly ye are but seemings — 
The shadowy cast-off gleamings 
Of bright solidities. Ye seem 
Soft as water, vague as dream ; 
Image, cast in a shifting stream. 

Ill 

What are ye? 

I know not. 

Brazen pan and iron pot, 



Anna Hempstead Branch 101 

Yellow brick and gray flag-stone . 

That my feet have trod upon — 

Ye seem to me 

Vessels of bright mystery. 

For ye do bear a shape, and so 

Though ye were made by man, I know 

An inner Spirit also made, 

And ye his breathings have obeyed. 



IV 

Shape, the strong and awful Spirit, 

Laid his ancient hand on you. 

He waste chaos doth inherit; 

He can alter and subdue. 

Verily, he doth lift up 

Matter, like a sacred cup. 

Into deep substance he reached, and lo 

Where ye were not, ye were; and so 

Out of useless nothing, ye 

Groaned and laughed and came to be. 

And I use you, as I can, 

Wonderful uses, made for man, 

Iron pot and brazen pan. 



What are ye? 

I know not: 

Nor what I really do 

When I move and govern you. 

There is no small work unto God. 

He required of us greatness; 



102 Anna Hempstead Branch 

Of his least creature 

A high angelic nature, 

Stature superb and bright completeness. 

He sets to us no humble duty. 

Each act that he would have us do 

Is haloed round with strangest beauty; 

Terrific deeds and cosmic tasks 

Of his plainest child he asks. 

When I polish the brazen pan 

I hear a creature laugh afar 

In the gardens of a star, 

And from his burning presence run 

Flaming wheels of many a sun. 

Whoever makes a thing more bright, 

He is an angel of all light. 

When I cleanse this earthen floor 

My spirit leaps to see 

Bright garments trailing over it, 

A cleanness made by me. 

Purger of all men's thoughts and ways, 

With labor do I sound Thy praise, 

My work is done for Thee. 

Whoever makes a thing more bright, 

He is an angel of all light. 

Therefore let me spread abroad 

The beautiful cleanness of my God. 

VI 

One time in the cool of dawn 
Angels came and worked with me. 
The air was soft with many a wing. 
They laughed amid my solitude 
And cast bright looks on everything. 



Anna Hempstead Branch 103 

Sweetly of me did they ask 

That they might do my common task. 

And all were beautiful — but one 

With garments whiter than the sun 

Had such a face 

Of deep, remembered grace; 

That when I saw I cried — "Thou art 

The great Blood-Brother of my heart. 

Where have I seen thee?" — And he said, 

"When w r e are dancing round God's throne, 

How often thou art there. 

Beauties from thy hands have flown 

Like white doves wheeling in mid air. 

Nay — thy soul remembers not? 

Work on, and cleanse thy iron pot." 

VII 

What are we ? I know not. 



Amy Lowell 

Amy Lowell was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, February 
9, 1874, °f a l° n g hne of noted publicists and poets, the first 
colonist (a Percival Lowell) arriving in Newburyport in 1637. 
James Russell Lowell was a cousin of her grandfather; Abbott 
Lawrence, her mother's father, was minister to England; and 
Abbott Lawrence Lowell, her brother, is president of Harvard 
University. 

Her first volume, A Dome of Many-colored Glass (1912), was 
a strangely unpromising book. The subjects were as conven- 
tional as the treatment of them; the influence of Keats and Ten- 
nyson was evident; the tone was soft and almost without a 
trace of personality. It was a queer prologue to the vivid 
Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1914) and Men, Women and 
Ghosts (1916), which marked not only an extraordinary ad- 



104 Amy Lowell 

vance but a totally new individuality. These two volumes 
contained many distinctive poems written in the usual forms, 
a score of pictorial pieces illustrating Miss Lowell's identifica- 
tion with the Imagists (see Preface) and the first appearance 
in English of "polyphonic prose." 

It was because of such experiments in form and technique 
that Miss Lowell first attracted attention and is still best 
known. But, beneath her preoccupation with theories and nov- 
elty of utterance, one can observe and appreciate the designer 
of arabesques, the poet of the external world, the dynamic 
artificer who (vide such poems as "A Lady," "Vintage" and 
the epical "Bronze Horses") revivifies history with a creative 
excitement. 

Can Grande's Castle (1918), like the later Legends (1921), 
reveals Miss Lowell as the gifted narrator, the teller of 
bizarre and brilliant stories. The feverish agitation is less 
prominent in her quieter and more personal Pictures of the 
Floating World (1919), a no less distinctive volume. 

Besides Miss Lowell's original poetry, she has made many 
studies in Japanese and Chinese poetry, reflecting, even in her 
own work, their Oriental colors and contours. She has also 
written two volumes of critical essays: Six French Poets (191 5) 
and Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (1917), both of 
them invaluable aids to the student of contemporary literature* 



SOLITAIRE x 

When night drifts along the streets of the city, 

And sifts down between the uneven roofs, 

My mind begins to peek and peer. 

It plays at ball in odd, blue Chinese gardens, 

And shakes wrought dice-cups in Pagan temples 

Amid the broken flutings of white pillars. 

It dances with purple and yellow crocuses in its hair, 

And its feet shine as they flutter over drenched grasses. 

1 Reprinted by permission of the publishers, the Macmillan 
Company, from Pictures of the Floating World by Amy Lowell. 



Amy Lowell 105 

How light and laughing my mind is, 

When all good folks have put out their bedroom candles, 

And the city is still. 



MEETING-HOUSE HILL 

I must be mad, or very tired, 

When the curve of a blue bay beyond a railroad track 

Is shrill and sweet to me like the sudden springing of 

a tune, 
And the sight of a white church above thin trees in a 

city square 
Amazes my eyes as though it were the Parthenon. 
Clear, reticent, superbly final, 
With the pillars of its portico refined to a cautious 

elegance, 
It dominates the weak trees, 
And the shot of its spire 
Is cool and candid, 
Rising into an unresisting sky. 
Strange meeting-house 

Pausing a moment upon a squalid hill-top. 
I watch the spire sweeping the sky, 
I am dizzy with the movement of the sky; 
I might be watching a mast 
With its royals set full 
Straining before a two-reef breeze. 
I might be sighting a tea-clipper, 
Tacking into the blue bay, 
Just back from Canton 

With her hold full of green and blue porcelain 
And a Chinese coolie leaning over the rail 
Gazing at the white spire 
With dull, sea-spent eyes. 



106 Amy Lowell 

WIND AND SILVER 

Greatly shining, 

The Autumn moon floats in the thin sky ; 

And the fish-ponds shake their backs and flash their 

dragon scales 
As she passes over them. 

A LADY » 

You are beautiful and faded, 

Like an old opera tune 

Played upon a harpsichord; 

Or like the sun-flooded silks 

Of an eighteenth-century boudoir. 

In your eyes 

Smoulder the fallen roses of outlived minutes, 

And the perfume of your soul 

Is vague and suffusing 

With the pungence of sealed spice-jars. 

Your half-tones delight me, 

And I grow mad with gazing 

At your blent colors. 



My vigor is a new-minted penny, 
Which I cast at your feet. 
Gather it up from the dust 
That its sparkle may amuse you. 



1 Reprinted by permission of the publishers, the Macmillan 
Company, from Sword Blades and Poppy Seed by Amy Lowell. 



Amy Lowell 107 



A DECADE 1 

When you came, you were like red wine and honey, 

And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness 

Now you are like morning bread, 

Smooth and pleasant. 

I hardly taste you at all, for I know your savour; 

But I am completely nourished. 



Ridgely Torrence 



> 



(Frederic) Ridgely Torrence was born at Xenia, Ohio, 
November 27, 1875, and was educated at Miami and Princeton 
University. For several years he was librarian of the Astor 
Library in New York City (1897-1901) and has been on several 
editorial staffs since then. 

His first volume, The House of a Hundred Lights (1900), 
bears the grave subtitle "A Psalm of Experience after Reading 
a Couplet of Bidpai" and is a half-whimsical, half-searching 
mixture of philosophy, love lyrics, artlessness and impudence. 

Torrence's subsequent uncollected verses have a deeper 
force, a more concentrated fire. In "The Bird and the Tree" 
and "Eye-Witness, " he has caught something more than the 
colors of certain localities — particularly of the dark race. 



THE BIRD AND THE TREE 

Blackbird, blackbird in the cage, 
There's something wrong tonight. 
Far off the sheriff's footfall dies, 
The minutes crawl like last year's flies 
Between the bars, and like an age 
The hours are long tonight. 

1 Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The Macmillan 
Company, from Pictures of the Floating World by Amy Lowell. 



108 Ridgely Torrence 

The sky is like a heavy lid 

Out here beyond the door tonight. 

What's that ? A mutter down the street. 

What's that? The sound of yells and feet. 

For what you didn't do or did 

You'll pay the score tonight. 



No use to reek with reddened sweat, 
No use to whimper and to sweat. 
They've got the rope; they've got the guns, 
They've got the courage and the guns; 
An' that's the reason why tonight 
No use to ask them any more. 
They'll fire the answer through the door — 
You're out to die tonight. 

There where the lonely cross-road lies, 
There is no place to make replies ; 
But silence, inch by inch, is there, 
And the right limb for a lynch is there ; 
And a lean daw waits for both your eyes, 
Blackbird. 



Perhaps you'll meet again some place. 
Look for the mask upon the face; 
That's the way you'll know them there — 
A white mask to hide the face. 
And you can halt and show them there 
The things that they are deaf to now, 
And they can tell you what they meant — 
To wash the blood with blood. But how 
If you are innocent? 



Ridgely Torrence 109 

Blackbird singer, blackbird mute, 

They choked the seed you might have found. 

Out of a thorny field you go — 

For you it may be better so — 

And leave the sowers of the ground 

To eat the harvest of the fruit, 

Blackbird. 



Robert Frost 

Although known as the chief interpreter of the new New 
England, Robert (Lee) Frost was born in San Francisco, Cali- 
fornia, March 26, 1875. At the age of ten he came East to the 
towns and hills where, for eight generations, his forefathers 
had lived. After graduating from the high school at Lawrence, 
Massachusetts, in 1892, Frost entered Dartmouth College, where 
he remained only a few months. The routine of study was too 
much for him and, determined to keep his mind free for creative 
work, he decided to earn his living and became a bobbin boy in 
one of the mills at Lawrence. He had already begun to write 
poetry; a few of his verses had appeared in The Independent. 
But the strange, soil-flavored quality which even then distin- 
guished his lines was not relished by the editors, and for twenty 
years Frost continued to write his highly characteristic work in 
spite of the discouraging apathy. 

After another unsuccessful attempt to achieve culture via 
college (Harvard 1897), Frost engaged in industry. For about 
three years he taught school, made shoes, edited a weekly 
paper, and in 1900 became a farmer at Derry, New Hampshire. 
During the next eleven years Frost labored to wrest a living 
from the stubborn rocky hills with scant success. Loneliness 
claimed him for its own; the ground refused to give him a 
living; the literary world continued to remain oblivious of his 
existence. Frost sought a change of environment and, after a 
few years' teaching at Derry and Plymouth, New Hampshire, 
sold his farm and, with his wife and four children, sailed for 
England in September, 1912. 

A few months later, A Boy's Will (1913), his first collection, 



no Robert Frost 

was published and Frost was recognized at once as one of the 
few authentic voices of modern poetry. In the spring of the 
same year, North of Boston (1914), one of the most intensely 
American books ever printed, was published in England. (See 
Preface.) This is, as he has called it, a "book of people." 
And it is more than that — it is a book of backgrounds as living 
and dramatic as the people they overshadow. Frost vivifies a 
stone wall, an empty cottage, an apple-tree, a mountain, a for- 
gotten wood-pile left 

To warm the frozen swamp as best it could 
With the slow, smokeless burning of decay. 

North of Boston, like its successor, contains much of the finest 
poetry of our time. Rich in its actualities, richer in its spiritual 
values, every line moves with the double force of observation 
and implication. The poet's colors and characters are close 
to their soil ; they remain rooted in realism. But Frost is 
never a photographic realist. "There are," he once said, "two 
types of realist — the one who offers a good deal of dirt with 
his potato to show that it is a real one; and the one who is 
satisfied with the potato brushed clean. I'm inclined to be the 
second kind. . . . To me, the thing that art does for life is 
to strip it to form." 

Sounds, the delicate accents of speech, find their most sympa- 
thetic recorder here. Frost's lines disclose the subtle shades of 
emphasis and expression in words, in the rhythms and tones 
that call to life a whole scene by presenting only a significant 
detail. "If I must be classified as a poet," Frost once said, 
with the suspicion of a twinkle, "I might be called a Synecdo- 
chist; for I prefer the synecdoche in poetry — that figure of 
speech in which we use a part for the whole." 

In March, 191 5, Frost came back to America — to a hill outside 
of Franconia, New Hampshire, to be precise. North of Boston 
had been published in the United States and its author, who 
had left the country an unknown writer, returned to find himself 
famous. Mountain Interval, containing some of Frost's most 
beautiful poems ("Birches," "An Old Man's Winter Night," 
"The Hill Wife"), appeared in 191 6. The idiom is the same 
as in the earlier volumes, but the notes are more varied, the 
convictions are stronger. The essential things are unchanged. 
The first poem in Frost's first book sums it up: 



Robert Frost in 

They would not find me changed from him they knew — 
Only more sure of all I thought was true. 

The fanciful by-play, the sly banter, so characteristic of this 
poet, has made his grimness far less "gray" than some of his 
critics are willing to admit. 

In 1920, after teaching at Amherst College (1916-19), Frost 
bought a few acres in Vermont and devoted himself once more 
to the double labors of farmer and poet. Through his lyrics 
as well as his quasi-narratives, he has uttered (and is voicing) 
some of the deepest and richest notes in American Poetry. 



MENDING WALL 

Something there is that doesn't love a wall, 
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, 
And spills the upper boulders in the sun ; 
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. 
The work of hunters is another thing: 
I have come after them and made repair 
Where they have left not one stone on a stone, 
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding, 
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean, 
No one has seen them made or heard them made, 
But at spring mending-time we find them there. 
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill; 
And on a day we meet to walk the line 
And set the wall between us once again. 
We keep the wall between us as we go. 
To each the boulders that have fallen to each. 
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls 
We have to use a spell to make them balance; 
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned !" 
We wear our fingers rough with handling them. 
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game, 



112 Robert Frost 

One on a side. It comes to little more: 

He is all pine and I am apple-orchard. 

My apple trees will never get across 

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. 

He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors." 

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder 

If I could put a notion in his head: 

"Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it 

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. 

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know 

What I was walling in or walling out, 

And to whom I was like to give offence. 

Something there is that doesn't love a wall, 

That wants it down!" I could say "Elves" to him, 

But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather 

He said it for himself. I see him there, 

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top 

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. 

He moves in darkness as it seems to me, 

Not of woods only and the shade of trees. 

He will not go behind his father's saying, 

And he likes having thought of it so well 

He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors." 



THE TUFT OF FLOWERS 

I went to turn the grass once after one 
Who mowed it in the dew before the sun. 

The dew was gone that made his blade so keen 
Before I came to view the levelled scene. 

I looked for him behind an isle of trees; 
I listened for his whetstone on the breeze. 



Robert Frost 113 

But he had gone his way, the grass all mown, 
And I must be, as he had been, — alone, 

"As all must be," I said within my heart, 
"Whether they work together or apart." 

But as I said it, swift there passed me by 
On noiseless wing a bewildered butterfly, 

Seeking with memories grown dim over night 
Some resting flower of yesterday's delight. 

And once I marked his flight go round and round, 
As where some flower lay withering on the ground. 

And then he flew as far as eye could see, 

And then on tremulous wing came back to me. 

I thought of questions that have no reply, 

And would have turned to toss the grass to dry; 

But he turned first, and led my eye to look 
At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook, 

A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared 
Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared. 

I left my place to know them by their name, 
Finding them butterfly-weed when I came. 

The mower in the dew had loved them thus, 
By leaving them to flourish, not for us, 

Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him, 
But from sheer morning gladness at the brim. 

The butterfly and I had lit upon, 
Nevertheless, a message from the dawn, 



114 Robert Frost 

That made me hear the wakening birds around, 
And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground, 

And feel a spirit kindred to my own; 

So that henceforth I worked no more alone; 

But glad with him, I worked as with his aid, 
And weary, sought at noon with him the shade; 

And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech 
With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach. 

"Men work together, ,, I told him from the heart, 
"Whether they work together or apart." 



BLUE-BUTTERFLY DAY 

It is blue-butterfly day here in spring, 

And with these sky-flakes down in flurry on flurry, 

There is more unmixed color on the wing 

Than flowers will show for days unless they hurry. 

But these are flowers that fly and all but sing; 
And now from having ridden out desire, 
They lie closed over in the wind and cling 
Where wheels have freshly sliced the April mire. 



BIRCHES 

When I see birches bend to left and right 

Across the line of straighter darker trees, 

I like to think some boy's been swinging them. 

But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay. 

Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them 

Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning 



Robert Frost 115 

After a rain. They click upon themselves 

As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored 

As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel. 

Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells 

Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust — 

Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away 

You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen. 

They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load, 

And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed 

So low for long, they never right themselves: 

You may see their trunks arching in the woods 

Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground 

Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair 

Before them over their heads to dry in the sun. 

But I was going to say when Truth broke in 

With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm, 

I should prefer to have some boy bend them 

As he went out and in to fetch the cows — 

Some boy too far from town to learn baseball, 

Whose only play was what he found himself, 

Summer or winter, and could play alone. 

One by one he subdued his father's trees 

By riding them down over and over again 

Until he took the stiffness out of them, 

And not one but hung limp, not one was left 

For him to conquer. He learned all there was 

To learn about not launching out too soon 

And so not carrying the tree away 

Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise 

To the top branches, climbing carefully 

With the same pains you use to fill a cup 

Up to the brim, and even above the brim. 

Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish, 

Kicking his way down through the air to the ground. 



1 16 Robert Frost 

So was I once myself a swinger of birches; 

And so I dream of going back to be. 

It's when I'm weary of considerations, 

And life is too much like a pathless wood 

Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs 

Broken across it, and one eye is weeping 

From a twig's having lashed across it open. 

Td like to get away from earth awhile 

And then come back to it and begin over. 

May no fate wilfully misunderstand me 

And half grant what I wish and snatch me away 

Not to return. Earth's the right place for love: 

I don't know where it's likely to go better. 

I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree, 

And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk 

Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more, 

But dipped its top and set me down again. 

That would be good both going and coming back. 

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches. 



THE ONSET 

Always the same when on a fated night 
At last the gathered snow lets down as white 
As may be in dark woods and with a song 
It shall not make again all winter long — 
Of hissing on the yet uncovered ground, — 
I almost stumble looking up and round, 
As one who, overtaken by the end, 
Gives up his errand and lets death descend 
Upon him where he is, with nothing done 
To evil, no important triumph won 
More than if life had never been begun. 



Robert Frost 0^7^) 

Yet all the precedent is on my side: 

I know that winter-death has never tried 

The earth but it has failed; the snow may heap 

In long storms an undrifted four feet deep 

As measured against maple, birch and oak; 

It cannot check the Peeper's silver croak; 

And I shall see the snow all go down hill 

In water of a slender April rill 

That flashes tail through last year's withered brake 

And dead weeds like a disappearing snake. 

Nothing will be left white but here a birch 

And there a clump of houses with a church. 



Carl Sandburg 

Carl (August) Sandburg was born of Swedish stock at 
Galesburg, Illinois, January 6, 1878. His schooling was hap- 
hazard; at thirteen he went to work on a milk wagon. During 
the next six years he was, in rapid succession, porter in a barber 
shop, scene-shifter in a cheap theatre, truck-handler in a brick- 
yard, turner apprentice in a pottery, dish-washer in Denver 
and Omaha hotels, harvest hand in Kansas wheat fields. These 
tasks equipped him, as no amount of learning could have done, 
to be the laureate of industrial America. 

In 1904, Sandburg published the proverbial "slender sheaf"; 
a tiny pamphlet of twenty-two poems, uneven in quality but 
strangely like the work of the mature Sandburg in feeling. 
It was twelve years later before the poet became known to 
the public. The vigor which lay at the heart of American toil 
found its outlet at last. 

Chicago Poems (1916) is full of ferment; it seethes with a 
direct poetry surcharged with tremendous energy. Here is an 
almost animal exultation that is also an exaltation. Sandburg's 
speech is simple and powerful; he uses slang as freely (and 
beautifully) as his predecessors used the now archaic tongue 
of their times. (See Preface.) Immediately the cries of pro- 
test were heard: Sandburg was coarse and brutal; his work 



1 1 8 Carl Sandburg 

ugly and distorted; his language unrefined, unfit for poetry. 
His detractors forgot that Sandburg was only brutal when 
dealing with brutality; that, beneath his toughness, he was one 
of the tenderest of living poets. 

Cornhuskers (1918) is another step forward; it is fully as 
sweeping as its forerunner and far more sensitive. The gain 
in power and restraint is evident in the very first poem, a 
magnificent panoramic vision of the prairie. Here is something 
of the surge of a Norse saga; Cornhuskers is keen with a rude 
fervor, a vast sympathy for all that is splendid and terrible in 
Nature. But the raw violence is restrained to the point of 
mysticism. There are, in this volume, dozens of those delicate 
perceptions of beauty that must astonish those who think that 
Sandburg can write only a big-fisted, roughneck sort of poetry. 
"Cool Tombs," one of the most poignant lyrics of our time, 
moves with a new music; "Grass" whispers as quietly as the 
earlier "Fog" stole in on stealthy, cat-like feet. 

Smoke and Steel (1920) which won a prize awarded to the 
most distinctive poetry of the year, is the sublimation of its 
predecessors. In this ripest of his collections, Sandburg has 
fused mood, accent and image in a fresh intensity. It is a fit 
setting for the title poem; it is, in spite of certain over-mystical 
accents, an epic of industrialism. Smoke-belching chimneys are 
here, quarries and great boulders of iron-ribbed rock; here are 
titanic visions: the dreams of men and machinery. And silence 
is here — the silence of sleeping tenements and sun-soaked corn- 
fields. Slabs of the Sunburnt West, an amplification of this 
strain, appeared in 1922. 

What makes all this work so vital is Sandburg's own spirit: 
a never-sated joy in existence, a continually fresh delight in the 
variety and wonder of life. 



GRASS 

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. 
Shovel them under and let me work — 

I am the grass; I cover all. 

And pile them high at Gettysburg 

And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun. 



Carl Sandburg 1 19 

Shovel them under and let me work. 

Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor: 

What place is this? 

Where are we now? 

I am the grass. 
Let me work. 



PRAYERS OF STEEL 

Lay me on an anvil, O God. 

Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar. 

Let me pry loose old walls; 

Let me lift and loosen old foundations. 

Lay me on an anvil, O God. 
Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike. 
Drive me into the girders that hold a skyscraper together. 
Take red-hot rivets and fasten me into the central girders. 
Let me be the great nail holding a skyscraper through 
blue nights into white stars. 



COOL TOMBS 

When Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs, he 
forgot the copperheads and the assassin ... in the 
dust, in the cool tombs. 

And Ulysses Grant lost all thought of con men and Wall 
Street, cash and collateral turned ashes ... in the 
dust, in the cool tombs. 



120 Carl Sandburg 

Pocahontas , body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw 
in November or a pawpaw in May, did she wonder? 
does she remember? ... in the dust, in the cool 
tombs ? 

Take any streetful of people buying clothes and groceries, 
cheering a hero or throwing confetti and blowing tin 
horns . . . tell me if the lovers are losers . . . tell 
me if any get more than the lovers ... in the 
dust ... in the cool tombs. 



FOG 

The fog comes 
on little cat feet. 

It sits looking 
over harbor and city 
on silent haunches 
and then moves on. 



FROM "SMOKE AND STEEL" 

Smoke of the fields in spring is one, 

Smoke of the leaves in autumn another. 

Smoke of a steel-mill roof or a battleship funnel, 

They all go up in a line .with the smokestack, 

Or they twist ... in the slow twist ... of the wind. 

If the north wind comes they run to the south. 
If the west wind comes they run to the east. 

By this sign 

all smokes 

know each other. 



Carl Sandburg 121 

Smoke of the fields in spring and leaves in autumn, 

Smoke of the finished steel, chilled and blue, 

By the oath of work they swear: "I know you." 

Hunted and pissed from the center 
Deep down long ago when God made us over, 
Deep down are the cinders we came from — 
You and I and our heads of smoke. 



Some of the smokes God dropped on the job 
Cross on the sky and count our years 
And sing in the secrets of our numbers; 
Sing their dawns and sing their evenings, 
Sing an old log-fire song: 

You may put the damper up, 

You may put the damper down, 

The smoke goes up the chimney just the same. 

Smoke of a city sunset skyline, 
Smoke of a country dust horizon — 

They cross on the sky and count our years. 



A bar of steel — it is only 
Smoke at the heart of it, smoke and the blood of a man. 
A runner of fire ran in it, ran out, ran somewhere else, 
And left smoke and the blood of a man 
And the finished steel, chilled and blue. 

So fire runs in, runs out, runs somewhere else again, 
And the bar of steel is a gun, a wheel, a nail, a shovel, 
A rudder under the sea, a steering-gear in the sky; 
And always dark in the heart and through it, 
Smoke and the blood of a man. 




122 Carl Sandburg 

Pittsburg, Youngstown, Gary — they make their steel 
with men. 

In the blood of men and the ink of chimneys 

The smoke nights write their oaths: 

Smoke into steel and blood into steel; 

Homestead, Braddock, Birmingham, they make their steel 

with men. 
Smoke and blood is the mix of steel. 

The birdmen drone 
In the blue; it is steel 
a motor sings and zooms. 



Steel barb-wire around The Works. 

Steel guns in the holsters of the guards at the gates of 

The Works. 
Steel ore-boats bring the loads clawed from the earth by 

steel, lifted and lugged by arms of steel, sung 

on its way by the clanking clam-shells. 
The runners now, the handlers now, are steel; they dig 

and clutch and haul; they hoist their 

automatic knuckles from job to job; they are 

steel making steel. 
Fire and dust and air fight in the furnaces; the pour is 

timed, the billets wriggle; the clinkers are 

dumped : 
Liners on the sea, skyscrapers on the land; diving steel 

in the sea, climbing steel in the sky. 



Adelaide Crapsey 

Adelaide Crapsey was born, September 9, 1878, at Rochester, 
New York, where she spent her childhood. She entered Vassar 



Adelaide Crapsey 1 23 

College in 1897, graduating with the class of 1901. In 1905 
she went abroad, studying archaeology in Rome. After her re- 
turn she essayed to teach, but her failing health compelled her 
to discontinue and though she became instructor in Poetics at 
Smith College in 1911, the burden was too great for her. 

In 1913, after her breakdown, she began to write those brief 
lines which, like some of Emily Dickinson's, are so precise and 
poignant. She was particularly happy in her "Cinquains," a 
form that she originated. These five-line stanzas in the strictest 
possible structure (the lines having, respectively, two, four, six, 
eight and two syllables) doubtless owe something to the 
Japanese hokku, but Adelaide Crapsey saturated them with her 
own fragile loveliness. 

She died at Saranac Lake, New York, on October 8, 1914. 
Her small volume Verse appeared in 1915, and a part of an 
unfinished Study in English Metrics was posthumously published 
in 1918. 



THREE CINQUAINS 

NOVEMBER NIGHT 

Listen . . . 

With faint dry sound, 

Like steps of passing ghosts, 

The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees 

And fall. 

TRIAD 

These be 

Three silent things: 

The falling snow . . . the hour 

Before the dawn . . . the mouth of one 

Just dead. 



124 Adelaide Craps ey 



THE WARNING 

Just now, 

Out of the strange 

Still dusk ... as strange, as still . . . 

A white moth flew. Why am I grown 

So cold? 



ON SEEING WEATHER-BEATEN TREES 

Is it as plainly in our living shown, 

By slant and twist, which way the wind hath blown? 



Grace Hazard Conkling 

Grace Hazard Conkling was born in 1878 in New York City. 
After graduating from Smith College in 1899, she studied music 
at the University of Heidelberg (1902-3) and Paris (1903-4). 
Since 1914 she has been a teacher of English at Smith College, 
where she has done much to create an alert interest in poetry. 

Mrs. Conkling's Afternoons of April (1915) and Wilderness 
Songs (1920) are full of a graciousness that seldom grows 
cloying. There is fragrant whimsicality, a child-like freshness 
in poems like "The Whole Duty of Berkshire Brooks," and 
"Frost on a Window," which remind one of the manner of 
her daughter, Hilda, (see page 213). 



FROST ON A WINDOW 

This forest looks the way 
Nightingales sound. 
Tall larches lilt and sway 
Above the glittering ground: 
The wild white cherry spray 
Scatters radiance round. 



Grace Hazard Conkling 125 

The chuckle of the nightingale 

Is like this elfin wood. 

Even as his gleaming trills assail 

The spirit's solitude, 

These leaves of light, these branches frail 

Are music's very mood. 

The song of these fantastic trees, 
The plumes of frost they wear, 
Are for the poet's whim who sees 
Through a deceptive air, 
And has an ear for melodies 
When never a sound is there. 



Vachel Lindsay 



-V^- 



(Nicholas) Vachel Lindsay was born in the house where he 
still lives in Springfield, Illinois, November 10, 1879. His home 
is next door to the Executive mansion of the State of Illinois; 
from the window where Lindsay does most of his writing, he 
saw many Governors come and go, including the martyred 
John P. Altgeld, whom he has celebrated in one of his finest 
poems. He graduated from the Springfield High School, at- 
tended Hiram College (1897-1900), studied at the Art Institute 
at Chicago (1900-3) and at the New York School of Art (1904). 
After two years of lecturing and settlement work, he took the 
first of his long tramps, walking through Florida, Georgia and 
the Carolinas, preaching "the gospel of beauty," and formulat- 
ing his unique plans for a communal art. (See Preface.) 

Like a true revivalist, he attempted to wake in the people he 
met a response to beauty; like Tommy Tucker, he sang, recited 
and chanted for his supper, distributing a little pamphlet en- 
titled "Rhymes to be Traded for Bread." But the great audiences 
he was endeavoring to reach did not hear him, even though 
his collection General Booth Enters Into Heaven (1913) struck 
many a loud and racy note. 

Lindsay broadened his effects, developed the chant and, the 



126 Vachel Lindsay 

following year, published his The Congo and Other Poems 
(1914), an infectious blend of Lindsay's three R's: Rhyme, 
Religion and Ragtime. In the title-poem and, in a lesser degree, 
the three companion chants, Lindsay struck his most powerful 
— and most popular — vein. These gave people (particularly 
when intoned aloud) that primitive joy in syncopated sound 
which is at the very base of song. The Chinese Nightingale 
(1917) begins with one of the most whimsical pieces Lindsay 
has ever devised. And if the subsequent The Golden Whales 
of California (1920) is less distinctive, it is principally be- 
cause the author has written too much and too speedily to be 
self-critical. It is his peculiar appraisal of loveliness, the 
rollicking high spirits joined to a stubborn evangelism, that 
makes Lindsay so representative a product of his environment. 

Besides his original poetry, Lindsay has embodied his ex- 
periences and meditations on the road in two prose volumes, 
A Handy Guide for Beggars (191 6) and Adventures While 
Preaching the Gospel of Beauty (1914), as well as a prophetic 
study of the "silent drama," The Art of the Moving Picture 
(1915). 



THE EAGLE THAT IS FORGOTTEN » 

[John P. Altgeld. Born December 30, 1847; 
died March 12, iqo2~\ 

Sleep softly . . . eagle forgotten . . . under the 

stone, 
Time has its way with you there, and the clay has its 

own. 
"We have buried him now," thought your foes, and in 

secret rejoiced. 
They made a brave show of their mourning, their hatred 

unvoiced. 



1 Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The Macmillan 
Company from General William Booth Enters into Heaven and 
Other Poems by Vachel Lindsay. 









Vachel Lindsay 127 

They had snarled at you, barked at you, foamed at you, 

day after day, 
Now you were ended. They praised you, . . . and laid 

you away. 

The others that mourned you in silence and terror and 

truth, 
The widow bereft of her pittance, the boy without youth, 
The mocked and the scorned and the wounded, the lame 

and the poor 
That should have remembered forever, . . . remember 

no more. 

Where are those lovers of yours, on what name do they 

call 
The lost, that in armies wept over your funeral pall? 
They call on the names of a hundred high-valiant ones, 
A hundred white eagles have risen, the sons of your sons, 
The zeal in their wings is a zeal that your dreaming 

began, 
The valor that wore out your soul in the service of man. 

Sleep softly, . . . eagle forgotten, . . . under the stone, 
Time has its way with you there, and the clay has its own. 
Sleep on, O brave hearted, O wise man, that kindled 

the flame — 
To live in mankind is far more than to live in a name, 
To live in mankind, far, far more . . . than to live 

in a name. 

TO A GOLDEN HAIRED GIRL IN A 
LOUISIANA TOWN 

You are a sunrise, 

If a star should rise instead of the sun. 

You are a moonrise, 



128 Vachel Lindsay 

If a star should come in the place of the moon. 

You are the Spring, 

If a face should bloom instead of an apple-bough. 

You are my love, 

If your heart is as kind 

As your young eyes now. 



THE TRAVELLER 

The moon's a devil jester 
Who makes himself too free. 
The rascal is not always 
Where he appears to be. 
Sometimes he is in my heart — 
Sometimes he is in the sea; 
Then tides are in my heart, 
And tides are in the sea. 

O traveller, abiding not 
Where he pretends to be! 

THE CONGO * 

{A Study of the Negro Race) 

I. Their Basic Savagery 

Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room, 
Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable, 
Sagged and reeled and pounded on the $ as * eep rolling 
table, 

1 Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The Macmillan 
Company, from The Congo and Other Poems by Vachel 
Lindsay. 



Vachel Lindsay 129 

Pounded on the table, 

Beat an empty barrel with the handle of 

a broom, 
Hard as they were able, 
Boom, boom, Boom, 
With a silk umbrella and the handle of a 

broom, 
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, Boom. 

Then I had religion, Then I had a 
vision. 

I could not turn from their revel in de- 
rision. 

THEN I SAW THE CONGO, CREEPING More deliberate. 

* Solemnly 

THROUGH THE BLACK, chanted. 

Cutting through the jungle with 

a golden track. 
Then along that riverbank 
A thousand miles 
Tattooed cannibals danced in files; 
Then I heard the boom of the blood-lust 

song 
And a thigh-bone beating on a tin-pan £,r a P idl ,y 

° or- piling climax 

gong. of speed and 

And "Blood" screamed the whistles and 

the fifes of the warriors, 
"Blood" screamed the skull-faced, lean 

witch-doctors, 
"Whirl ye the deadly voodoo rattle, 
Harry the uplands, 
Steal all the cattle, 
Rattle-rattle, rattle-rattle, 
Bing! 
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, Boom," 



130 



Vachel Lindsay 



A roaring, epic, rag-time tune 

From the mouth of the Congo 

To the Mountains of the Moon. 

Death is an Elephant, 

Torch-eyed and horrible, 

Foam-flanked and terrible. 

Boom., steal the pygmies, 

Boom, kill the Arabs, 

Boom, kill the white men, 

Hoo, Hoo, Hoo. 

Listen to the yell of Leopold's ghost 

Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host. 

Hear how the demons chuckle and yell. 

Cutting his hands off, down in Hell. 

Listen to the creepy proclamation, 

Blown through the lairs of the forest- 
nation, 

Blown past the white-ants' hill of clay, 

Blown past the marsh where the butter- 
flies play: — 

"Be careful what you do, 

Or Mumbo- Jumbo, God of the Congo, 

And all of the other 

Gods of the Congo, 

Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you, 

Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you, 

Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you." 



With a philo- 
sophic pause. 



Shrilly and 
with a heavily 
accented 
meter. 



Like the wind 
in the chimney. 



All the o sounds 
very golden. 
Heavy accents 
very heavy. 
Light accents 
very light. Last 
line whispered. 



II. Their Irrepressible High Spirits 



Wild crap-shooters with a whoop and a call ^ he ^ hrUl 
Danced the juba in their gambling-hall 



Vachel Lindsay 131 



And laughed fit to kill, and shook the town, 
And guyed the policemen and laughed them 

down 
With a boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, 

Boom. . . , 

Then- I saw the Congo, creeping ? ea J f* ac ]p as 

' in first section. 

through the black, 
Cutting through the jungle with 

A GOLDEN TRACK. 



A negro fairyland swung into view, o^the^etfcat 

A minstrel river ideas. Keep as 

TTT1 . light-footed as 

Where dreams come true. possible. 

The ebony palace soared on high 

Through the blossoming trees to the eve- 
ning sky. 

The inlaid porches and casement shone 

With gold and ivory and elephant-bone. 

And the black crowd laughed till their 
sides were sore 

At the baboon butler in the agate door, 

And the well-known tunes of the parrot 
band 

That trilled on the bushes of that magic 
land. 



A troupe of skull-faced witch-men came With pomposity. 

Through the agate doorway in suits of 
flame, 

Yea, long-tailed coats w T ith a gold-leaf crust 

And hats that were covered with diamond- 
dust. 



132 Vachel Lindsay 

And the crowd in the court gave a whoop 

and a call 
And danced the juba from wall to wall. 
But the witch-men suddenly stilled the 

throng With a great 

-, Tr . ! ill i 11 deliberation and 

With a stern cold glare, and a stern old ghostiiness. 

song : — 
"Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you." . . . 
Just then from the doorway, as fat as 

SJlOteS, With overwhelm- 

Came the cake-walk princes in their long ^/^^ c % nd 
red coats, P° m P- 

Shoes with a patent leather shine, 

And tall silk hats that were red as wine. 

And they pranced with their butterfly 

partners there, mth gr0 wing 

Coal-black maidens with pearls in their %Z d piy n marked 

hair dance-rhythm. 

Knee-skirts trimmed with the jessamine 

sweet, 
And bells on their ankles and little black 

feet. 
And the couples railed at the chant and 

the frown 
Of the witch-men lean, and laughed them 

down. 
(O rare was the revel and well worth 

while 
That made those glowering witch-men 

smile.) 

The cake-walk royalty then began 

To walk for a cake that was tall as a man 

To the tune of "Boomlay, boomlay, Boom," 



Vachel Lindsay 133 

While the witch-men laughed with a 

siniQt-pr air With a touch °f 

sinister air, ^ negr0 dialect> 

And sang with the scalawags prancing and ... 

te ° r ° as rapidly as 

there I possible toward 

"Walk with care, walk with care, 

Or Mumbo- Jumbo, God of the Congo, 

And all of the other 

Gods of the Congo, 

Mumbo- Jumbo will hoo-doo you. 

Beware, beware, walk with care, 

Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, boom. 

Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, boom, 

Boomlay, boomlav, boomlay, 

Boom." 

Oh, rare was the revel, and well worth Sl °™. P hil f- 

' # ' sophxc calm. 

w^hile 
That made those glowering witch-men 
smile. 



III. The Hope of their Religion 
A good old negro in the slums of the town 2?5* ba J s - . 

T* 1 , • With a literal 

Preached at a sister for her velvet gown, imitation of 

tt i 1 11 c 1 • 1 1 camp-mecting 

Howled at a brother for his low-down racket, and 

trance. 

ways, 
His prowling, guzzling, sneak-thief days. 
Beat on the Bible till he wore it out, 
Starting the jubilee revival shout. 
And some had visions, as they stood on 

chairs, 
And sang of Jacob, and the golden stairs, 
And they all repented, a thousand strong, 
From their stupor and savagery and sin 

and wrong 



134 Vachel Lindsay 

And slammed their hymn books till they 

shook the room 
With "Glory, glory, glory," 
And "Boom, boom, Boom/' 

Then I saw the Congo/ creeping f™f r y st a s s ec Hon. 

through the black, 
Cutting through the jungle with 

a golden track. 
And the gray sky opened like a new-rent 

veil 
And showed the apostles with their coats 

of mail. 
In bright white steel they were seated 

round 
And their fire-eyes watched where the 

Congo wound. 
And the twelve apostles, from their thrones 

on high, 
Thrilled all the forest with their heavenly 



cry: — 



Sung to the 



tune of "Hark, 

"Mumbo- Jumbo will die in the jungle; ten thous p d 
Never again will he hoo-doo you, voices." 

Never again will he hoo-doo you." 

Then along that river-bank, a thousand With growing 

° 3 deliberation 

miles, and joy. 

The vine-snared trees fell down in files. 

Pioneer angels cleared the way 

For a Congo paradise, for babes at play, 

For sacred capitals, for temples clean. 

Gone were the skull-faced witch-men lean. 

There, where the wild ghost-gods had j n a rat h er 

wailed hi 8 h key—™ 

7f lieQ u delicately as 

A million boats of the angels sailed possible. 



Vachel Lindsay 135 

With oars of silver, and prows of blue 
And silken pennants that the sun shone 

through. 
'Twas a land transfigured, 'twas a new 

creation, 
Oh, a singing wind swept the negro nation ; 
And on through the backwoods clearing 

flew: — 
"M umbo- Jumbo is dead in the jungle. To the tune of 

Never again will he hoo-doo you. 'itoZand'larps 

Never again will he hoo-doo you." and voices." 

Redeemed were the forests, the beasts and 

the men, 
And only the vulture dared again 
By the far, lone mountains of the moon 
To cry, in the silence, the Congo tune : — 
"Mumbo- Jumbo will hoo-doo you. P?* n * °f 

Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you, trating, 

Mumbo . . . Jumbo . . . will . . . whisper. 

hoo-doo . . . you." 



John G. Neihardt 

John Gneisenau Neihardt was born at Sharpsburg, Illinois, 
January 8, 1881. He completed a scientific course at Nebraska 
Normal College in 1897 and lived among the Omaha Indians for 
six years (1901-7), studying their customs, characteristics and 
legends. 

Although he had already published two books, A Bundle of 
Myrrh (1908) was his first volume to attract notice. It was 
full of spirit, enthusiasm and an insistent virility — qualities 
which were extended (and overemphasized) in Man-Song 
(1909). Neihardt found a richer note and a new restraint in 
The Stranger at the Gate (1911), the best of the lyrics from 
these three volumes appearing in The Quest (1916). 



136 



John G. Neihardt 



Neihardt meanwhile had been going deeper into folk-lore, 
the results of which appeared in The Song of Hugh Glass 
(1915) and The Song of Three Friends (1919). The latter, 
in 1920, divided the annual prize offered by the Poetry Society, 
halving the honors with Gladys Cromwell's Poems. These two 
books of Neihardt's are detailed long poems, part of a projected 
epic series celebrating the winning of the West by the pioneers. 



CRY OF THE PEOPLE x 

Tremble before thy chattels, 
Lords of the scheme of things! 
Fighters of all earths battles, 
Ours is the might of kings! 
Guided by seers and sages, 
The world's heart-beat for a drum, 
Snapping the chains of ages, 
Out of the night we come! 

Lend us no ear that pities! 
Offer no almoner's hand! 
Alms for the builders of cities! 
When will you understand? 
Down with your pride of birth 
And your golden gods of trade! 
A man is worth to his mother, Earth, 
All that a man has made! 

We are the workers and makers. 
We are no longer dumb! 
Tremble, O Shirkers and Takers! 
Sweeping the earth — we come! 

1 Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The Macmillan 
Company, from The Quest by John G. Neihardt. 



John G. Neihardt 137 

Ranked in the world-wide dawn, 
Marching into the day! 
The night is gone and the sword is drawn 
And the scabbard is thrown away! 



LET ME LIVE OUT MY YEARS 1 

Let me live out my years in heat of blood ! 
Let me die drunken with the dreamer's wine! 
Let me not see this soul-house built of mud 
Go toppling to the dust — a vacant shrine. 

Let me go quickly, like a candle light 
Snuffed out just at the heyday of its glow. 
Give me high noon — and let it then be night! 
Thus would I go. 

And grant that when I face the grisly Thing, 
My song may trumpet down the gray Perhaps. 
Let me be as a tune-swept flddlestring 
That feels the Master Melody — and snaps! 



Witter By nner 



Witter Bynner was born at Brooklyn, New York, August 10, 
1881. He was graduated from Harvard in 1902 and has been 
assistant editor of various periodicals as well as adviser to 
publishers. Recently, he has spent much of his time lecturing 
on poetry and travelling in the Orient. 

Young Harvard (1907), the first of Bynner's volumes, was, 
as the name implies, a celebration of his Alma Mater. The New 
World (1915) is a much riper and far more ambitious effort. 

1 Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The Macmillan 
Company, from The Quest by John G. Neihardt, 



138 Witter Bynner 

In this extended poem, Bynner sought — almost too determinedly 
— to translate the ideals of democracy into verse. Neither of 
these volumes displays its author's gifts at their best, for 
Bynner is, first of all, a lyric poet. Grenstone Poems (1917) 
and A Canticle of Pan (1920) reveal a more natural singing 
voice. Bynner harmonizes in many keys; transposing, modu- 
lating and shifting from one tonality to another. 

Under the pseudonym "Emanuel Morgan," Bynner was co- 
author with Arthur Davison Ficke (writing under the name of 
"Anne Knish") of Spectra (1916). Spectra was a serious 
burlesque of some of the extreme manifestations of modern 
poetic tendencies — a remarkable hoax that deceived many of 
the radical propagandists as well as most of the conservative 
critics. 

GRASS-TOPS 

What bird are you in the grass-tops? 
Your poise is enough of an answer, 
With your wing-tips like up-curving fingers 
Of the slow-moving hands of a dancer . . . 

And what is so nameless as beauty, 
Which poets, who give it a name, 
Are only unnaming forever? — 
Content, though it go, that it came. 



VOICES 

O, there were lights and laughter 
And the motions to and fro 

Of people as they enter 

And people as they go . . . 

And there were many voices 

Vying at the feast, 
But mostly I remember 

Yours — who spoke the least. 



Witter Bynner 139 



A FARMER REMEMBERS LINCOLN •* 

"Lincoln?— 

Well, I was in the old Second Maine, 

The first regiment in Washington from the Pine Tree 

State. 
Of course I didn't get the butt of the clip; 
We was there for guardin' Washington — 
We was all green. 

"I ain't never ben to the theayter in my life — 

I didn't know how to behave. 

I ain't never ben since. 

I can see as plain as my hat the box where he sat in 

When he was shot. 

I can tell you, sir, there was a panic 

When we found our President was in the shape he was in ! 

Never saw a soldier in the world but what liked him. 

"Yes, sir. His looks was kind o' hard to forget. 

He was a spare man, 

An old farmer. 

Everything was all right, you know, 

But he wasn't a smooth-appearin' man at all — 

Not in no ways; 

Thin-faced, long-necked, 

And a swellin' kind of a thick lip like. 

"And he was a jolly old fellow — always cheerful; 
He wasn't so high but the boys could talk to him their 
own ways. 

*See pages 54, 78, 84,^142, 172. 

1 Reprinted by permission from Grenstone Poems by Witter 
Bynner. Copyright, 191 7, by Frederick A. Stokes Company. 



140 Witter By nner 

While I was servin' at the Hospital 

He'd come in and say, 'You look nice in here/ 

Praise us up, you know. 

And he'd bend over and talk to the boys — 

And he'd talk so good to 'em — so close — 

That's why I call him a farmer. 

I don't mean that everything about him wasn't all right, 

you understand, 
It's just — well, I was a farmer — 
And he was my neighbor, anybody's neighbor. 
I guess even you young folks would 'a' liked him." 



James Oppenheim 

James Oppenheim was born at St. Paul, Minnesota, May 24, 
1882. Two years later his family moved to New York City, 
where he has lived ever since. After a public school educa- 
tion, he took special courses at Columbia University (1901-3) 
and engaged in settlement work, acting in the capacity of 
assistant head worker of the Hudson Guild Settlement, and 
superintendent of the Hebrew Technical School for Girls 
(1904-7). 

Oppenheim's initial venture as a poet, Monday Morning and 
Other Poems (1909), was a tentative collection; half imitative, 
half experimental. In spite of its spiritual indebtedness to 
Whitman, most of the verses are in formal meters and regular 
(though ragged) rhyme. 

In Songs for the New Age (1914) and War and Laughter 
(1916) the notes are much fuller; we listen to a speech that, 
echoing the Whitmanic sonority, develops a music that is 
strangely Biblical and yet local. (See Preface.) This volume, 
like all of Oppenheim's subsequent work {The Book of Self, 
1917, The Mystic Warrior, 1921) is analysis in terms of poetry, 
a slow searching that attempts to diagnose the twisting soul 
of man and the twisted times he lives in. The old Isaiah 
note, with a new introspection, rises out of such poems as "The 
Slave," "Tasting the Earth"; the music and imagery of the 



James Oppenheim 141 

Psalms are heard in "The Flocks" and "The Runner in the 
Skies." 

The Solitary (1919) is another stride forward. Its major 
section, a long symbolic poem called "The Sea," breathes the 
same note that was the burden of the earlier books — "We are 
flesh on the way to godhood" — with greater strength and still 
greater control. 



THE SLAVE 

They set the slave free, striking off his chains . 
Then he was as much of a slave as ever. 

He was still chained to servility, 

He was still manacled to indolence and sloth, 

He was still bound by fear and superstition, 

By ignorance, suspicion, and savagery . . . 

His slavery was not in the chains, 

But in himself. . . . 

They can only set free men free . . . 
And there is no need of that: 
Free men set themselves free. 



THE RUNNER IN THE SKIES 

Who is the runner in the skies, 
With her blowing scarf of stars, 
And our Earth and sun hovering like bees about her 

blossoming heart? 
Her feet are on the winds, where space is deep, 
Her eyes are nebulous and veiled ; 
She hurries through the night to a far lover . , , 



142 James Oppenheim 



THE LINCOLN CHILD * 

Clearing in the forest, 

In the wild Kentucky forest, 

And the stars, wintry stars, strewn above ! 

O Night that is the starriest 

Since Earth began to roll — 

For a Soul 

Is born out of Love! 

Mother love, father love, love of eternal God — 

Stars have pushed aside to let him through — 

Through heaven's sun-sown deeps 

One sparkling ray of God 

Strikes the clod — 

(And while an angel-host through wood and clearing 
sweeps ! ) 

Born in the wild 

The Child- 
Naked, ruddy, new, 

Wakes with the piteous human cry and at the mother- 
heart sleeps. 



To the mother wild berries and honey, 

To the father awe without end, 

To the child a swaddling of flannel — 

And a dawn rolls sharp and sunny 

And the skies of winter bend 

To see the first sweet word penned 

In the godliest human annal. 

1 See pages 54, 78, 84, 139, 172. 



James Oppenheim 143 

Soon in the wide wilderness, 

On a branch blown over a creek, 

Up a trail of the wild coon, 

In a lair of the wild bee, 

The rugged boy, by dangers stress, 

Learnt the speech the wild things speak, 

Learnt the Earth's eternal tune 

Of strife-engendered harmony — 

Went to school where Life itself was master, 

Went to church where Earth was minister — 

And in Danger and Disaster 

Felt his future manhood stir! 



And lo, as he grew ugly, gaunt, 

And gnarled his way into a man, 

What wisdom came to feed his want, 

What worlds came near to let him scan! 

And as he fathomed through and through 

Our dark and sorry human scheme, 

He knew what Shakespeare never knew, 

What Dante never dared to dream — 

That Men are one 

Beneath the sun, 

And before God are equal souls — 

This truth was his, 

And this it is 

That round him such a glory rolls. 

For not alone he knew it as a truth, 

He made it of his blood, and of his brain — 

He crowned it on the day when piteous Booth 

Sent a whole land to weeping with world pain — 



144 James Oppenheim 

When a black cloud blotted out the sun 
And men stopped in the streets to sob, 
To think Old Abe was dead. 
Dead, and the day's work still undone, 
Dead, and war's ruining heart athrob, 
And earth with fields of carnage freshly spread. 
Millions died fighting; 
But in this man we mourned 
Those millions, and one other — 
And the States today uniting, 
North and South, 
East and West, 
Speak with a people's mouth 
A rhapsody of rest 
To him our beloved best, 
Our big, gaunt, homely brother — 
Our huge Atlantic coast-storm in a shawl, 
Our cyclone in a smile — our President, 
Who knew and loved us all 
With love more eloquent 

Than his own words — with Love that in real deeds was 
spent. . . . 



Oh, to pour love through deeds — 

To be as Lincoln was! — 

That all the land might fill its daily needs 

Glorified by a human Cause! 

Then were America a vast World-Torch 

Flaming a faith across the dying Earth, 

Proclaiming from the Atlantic's rocky porch, 

That a New World was struggling at the birth! 

O living God, O Thou who living art 



James Oppenheim 145 

And real, and near, draw, as at that babe's birth, 

Into our souls and sanctify our Earth — 

Let down thy strength that we endure 

Mighty and pure 

As mothers and fathers of our own Lincoln-child. . . . 

O Child, flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone, 

Soul torn from out our Soul! 

May you be great, and pure, and beautiful — 

A Soul to search this world 

To be a father, brother, comrade, son, 

A toiler powerful; 

A man whose toil is done 

One with God's Law above: 

Work wrought through Love! 



Lola Ridge 

Lola Ridge was born in Dublin, Ireland, leaving there in 
infancy and spending her childhood in Sydney, Australia. 
After living some years in New Zealand, she returned to Aus- 
tralia to study art. In 1907, she came to the United States, 
earning her living as organizer, as advertisement writer, as 
illustrator, artist's model, factory-worker, etc. In 1918, The 
New Republic published her long poem The Ghetto and Miss 
Ridge, until then totally unknown, became the "discovery" 
of the year. 

Her volume The Ghetto and Other Poems (1918) contains 
one poem that is brilliant, several that are powerful and none 
that is mediocre. The title-poem is its pinnacle; in it Miss 
Ridge touches strange heights. It is essentially a poem of the 
city, of its sodden brutalities, its sudden beauties. 

Sun-Up (1920) is less integrated, more frankly experimental. 
But the same vibrancy and restrained power that distinguished 
her preceding book are manifest here. 



146 Lola Ridge 



PASSAGES FROM "THE GHETTO" 

Old Sodos no longer makes saddles. 

He has forgotten how . . . 

Time spins like a crazy dial in his brain, 

And night by night 

I see the love-gesture of his arm 

In its green-greasy coat-sleeve 

Circling the Book, 

And the candles gleaming starkly 

On the blotched-paper whiteness of his face, 

Like a miswritten psalm . . . 

Night by night 

I hear his lifted praise, 

Like a broken whinnying 

Before the Lord's shut gate. 



Lights go out 

And the stark trunks of the factories 

Melt into the drawn darkness, 

Sheathing like a seamless garment. 

And mothers take home their babies, 

Waxen and delicately curled, 

Like little potted flowers closed under the stars. . , 

Lights go out . . . 

And colors rush together, 

Fusing and floating away. 

Pale worn gold like the settings of old jewels . . . 

Mauve, exquisite, tremulous, and luminous purples, 

And burning spires in aureoles of light 

Like shimmering auras. 



Lola Ridge 147 

They are covering up the pushcarts . . . 

Now all have gone save an old man with mirrors — 

Little oval mirrors like tiny pools. 

He shuffles up a darkened street 

And the moon burnishes his mirrors till they shine like 

phosphorus. • . . 
The moon like a skull, 
Staring out of eyeless sockets at the old men trundling 

home the pushcarts. 

Alfred Kreymborg 

Alfred Kreymborg, one of the most daring of the younger 
insurgents, was born in New York City, December 10, 1883. 
His education was spasmodic, his childhood being spent be- 
neath the roar of the elevated trains. At ten he was an ex- 
pert chess player, supporting himself, from the ages of seven- 
teen to twenty-five, by teaching and playing exhibition games. 
His passion, however, was not mathematics but music. At 
thirty, he began to turn to the theater as a medium. 

In 1914, he organized that group of radical poets which, 
half-deprecatingly, half-defiantly, called itself "Others." (He 
edited the three anthologies of their work published in 1916, 
1917 and 1919.) 

Meanwhile, he had been working on a technique that was 
an attempt to strip poetry of its frequent wordiness and rhe- 
torical non-essentials. Mushrooms (1916) was the first col- 
lection in this vein. Here Kreymborg continually sought for 
simplification, cutting away at his lines until they assumed an 
almost naked expression. Often he overdid his effects, at- 
taining nothing more than a false ingenuousness, a sophisticated 
simplicity. Often, too, he failed to draw the line between 
what is innocently childlike and what is merely childish. 

Kreymborg's most ambitious volume of poetry, Blood of 
Things (1920), is, for all the surface oddities, the work not 
only of an ardent experimenter but a serious thinker. Here, 
in spite of what seems a persistence of occasional charlatanry, 
is a rich and sensitive imagination; a fancy that is as wild as 
it is quick-witted. 



148 Alfred Kreymborg 



OLD MANUSCRIPT 

The sky 

is that beautiful old parchment 

in which the sun 

and the moon 

keep their diary. 

To read it all, 

one must be a linguist 

more learned than Father Wisdom 

and a visionary 

more clairvoyant than Mother Dream. 

But to feel it, 

one must be an apostle: 

one who is more than intimate 

in having been, always, 

the only confidant — 

like the earth 

or the sea. 



DAWNS 

I have come 

from pride 

all the way up to humility 

this day-to-night. 

The hill 

was more terrible 

than ever before. 

This is the top; 

there is the tall, slim tree. 

It isn't bent; it doesn't lean; 



Alfred Kreymborg 149 

It is only looking back. 

At dawn, 

under that tree, 

still another me of mine 

was buried. 

Waiting for me to come again, 

humorously solicitous 

of what I bring next, 

it looks down. 



Badger Clark 

Badger Clark was born at Albia, Iowa, in 1883. He moved 
to Dakota Territory at the age of three months and now lives 
in the Black Hills of South Dakota. 

Clark is one of the few men who have lived to see their 
work become part of folk-lore, many of his songs having 
been adapted and paraphrased by the cowboys who have made 
them their own. 

Sun and Saddle Leather (1915) and Grass-Grown Trails 
(1917) are the expression of a native singer; happy, spon- 
taneous and seldom "literary." There is wind in these songs; 
the smell of camp-smoke and the colors of prairie sunsets rise 
from them. Free, for the most part, from affectations, Clark 
achieves an unusual ease in his use of the local vernacular. 



THE GLORY TRAIL ' 

'Way high up the Mogollons, 

Among the mountain tops, 
A lion cleaned a yearlin's bones 

And licked his thankful chops, 

1 From Sun and Saddle Leather by Badger Clark. Copy- 
right, 1 91 5. Richard G. Badger, Publisher. 



150 Badger Clark 

When on the picture who should ride, 

A-trippin' down a slope, 
But High-Chin Bob, with sinful pride 

And mav'rick-hungry rope. 

"Oh, glory be to me," says he 
"And james unfadin flowers! 

All meddlin hands are jar away; 

I ride my good top-hawse today 

And I'm top-rope of the Lazy J — 
Hi! kitty cat, you re ours!" 

That lion licked his paw so brown 

And dreamed soft dreams of veal — 
And then the circlin' loop sung down 

And roped him 'round his meal. 
He yowled quick fury to the world 

Till all the hills yelled back; 
The top-hawse gave a snort and whirled 

And Bob caught up the slack. 

"Oh, glory be to me" laughs he. 

"We've hit the glory trail. 
No human man as I have read 
Darst loop a rag in lions head, 
Nor ever hawse could drag one dead 

Until we've told the tale." 

'Way high up the Mogollons 

That top-hawse done his best, 
Through whippin' brush and rattlin' stones, 

From canyon-floor to crest. 
But ever when Bob turned and hoped 

A limp remains to find, 



Badger Clark 151 

A red-eyed lion, belly roped 
But healthy, loped behind. 

"Oh, glory be to me," grunts he. 

"This glory trail is rough, 
Yet even till the Judgment Morn 
Fll keep this dally 'round the horn, 
For never any hero born 

Could stop to holler: 'NuffJ'" 

Three suns had rode their circle home 

Beyond the desert's rim, 
And turned their star-herds loose to roam 

The ranges high and dim; 
Yet up and down and 'round and 'cross 

Bob pounded, weak and wan, 
For pride still glued him to his hawse 

And glory drove him on. 

"Oh, glory be to me" sighs he. 

"He kaint be drug to death, 
But now I know beyond a doubt 
Them heroes I have read about 
Was only fools that stuck it out 

To end of ?nortal breath." 

'Way high up the Mogollons 

A prospect man did swear 
That moonbeams melted down his bones 

And hoisted up his hair: 
A ribby cow-hawse thundered by, 

A lion trailed along, 
A rider ga'nt but chin on high, 

Yelled out a crazy song. 



152 Badger Clark 

"Oh, glory be to me!" cries he, 

"And to my noble noose! 
Oh, stranger tell my pards below 
I took a rampin dream in tow, 
And if I never lay him low, 
I'll never turn him loose!" 



Harry Kemp 

Harry (Hibbard) Kemp, known as "the tramp-poet/' was 
born at Youngstown, Ohio, December 15, 1883. He came East 
at the age of twelve, left school to enter a factory, but re- 
turned to high school to study English. 

A globe-trotter by nature, he went to sea before finishing his 
high school course. He shipped first to Australia, then to 
China, from China to California, from California to the Uni- 
versity of Kansas. After a few months in London in 1909 (he 
crossed the Atlantic as a stowaway) he returned to New York 
City, where he has lived ever since, founding his own theater 
in which he is actor, stage-manager, playwright and chorus. 

His first collection of poems, The Cry of Youth (1914), like 
the subsequent volume, The Passing God (1919), is full of 
every kind of poetry except the kind one might imagine Kemp 
would write. Instead of crude and boisterous verse, here is 
a precise and almost over-polished poetry. Chanteys and Bal- 
lads (1920) is riper and more representative. The notes are 
more varied, the sense of personality is more pronounced. 



STREET LAMPS 

Softly they take their being, one by one, 

From the lamp-lightens hand, after the sun 

Has dropped to dusk . . . like little flowers they bloom 

Set in long rows amid the growing gloom. 

Who he who lights them is, I do not know, 
Except that, every eve, with footfall slow 



Harry Kemp 153 

And regular, he passes by my room 

And sets his gusty flowers of light a-bloom. 



A PHANTASY OF HEAVEN 

Perhaps he plays with cherubs now, 
Those little, golden boys of God, 

Bending, with them, some silver bough, 
The while a seraph, head a-nod, 

Slumbers on guard; how they will run 
And shout, if he should wake too soon, — 

As fruit more golden than the sun 
And riper than the full-grown moon, 

Conglobed in clusters, weighs them down, 
Like Atlas heaped with starry signs; 

And, if they're tripped, heel over crown, 
By hidden coils of mighty vines, — 

Perhaps the seraph, swift to pounce, 
Will hale them, vexed, to God — and He 

Will only laugh, remembering, once 
He was a boy in Galilee ! 



Max Eastman 

Max Eastman was born at Canandaigua, New York, Janu- 
ary 4, 1883. Both his father and mother had been Congre- 
gationalist preachers, so it was natural that the son should 
turn from scholasticism to a definitely social expression. East- 
man had received his A.B. at Williams in 1905 ; from 1907 
to 1911 he had been Associate in Philosophy at Columbia Uni- 
versity. But in the latter part of 191 1, he devoted all his 



1^4 Max Eastman 

time to writing, studying the vast problems of economic in- 
equality and voicing the protests of the dumb millions in a 
style that was all the firmer for being philosophic. In 1913, 
he became editor of The Masses which, in 1917, became The 
Liberator. 

His Child of the Amazons (1913) and Colors of Life (1918) 
reveal the quiet lover of beauty as well as the fiery hater of 
injustice. 



AT THE AQUARIUM 

Serene the silver fishes glide, 
Stern-lipped, and pale, and wonder-eyed! 
As, through the aged deeps of ocean, 
They glide with wan and wavy motion. 
They have no pathway where they go, 
They flow like water to and fro, 
They watch with never-winking eyes, 
They watch with staring, cold surprise, 
The level people in the air, 
The people peering, peering there: 
Who wander also to and fro, 
And know not why or where they go, 
Yet have a wonder in their eyes, 
Sometimes a pale and cold surprise. 



Eunice Tietjens 



Eunice Tietjens (nee Hammond) was born in Chicago, Illi- 
nois, July 29, 1884. She married Paul Tietjens, the composer, 
in 1904. During 1914 and 1916 she was Associate Editor of 
Poetry; A Magazine of Verse and went to France as war cor- 
respondent of the Chicago Daily News (1917-18). Her second 
marriage (to Cloyd Head, the writer) occurred in February, 
1920. 



Eunice Tietjens 155 

Profiles from China (1917) is a series of sketches of peo- 
ple, scenes and incidents observed in the interior. Written in 
a fluent free verse, the poems in this collection are alive with 
color and personality. 



THE MOST-SACRED MOUNTAIN 

Space, and the twelve clean winds of heaven, 
And this sharp exultation, like a cry, 
After the slow six thousand steps of climbing! 
This is Tai Shan, the beautiful, the most holy. 

Below my feet the foot-hills nestle, brown with flecks of 
green; and lower down the flat brown plain, the 
floor of earth, stretches away to blue infinity. 

Beside me in this airy space the temple roofs cut their 
slow curves against the sky, 

And one black bird circles above the void. 

Space, and the twelve clean winds are here; 

And w r ith them broods eternity — a swift, white peace, a 

presence manifest. 
The rhythm ceases here. Time has no place. This is 

the end that has no end. 

Here when Confucius came, a half a thousand years be- 
fore the Nazarene, 

He stepped, with me, thus into timelessness. 

The stone beside us waxes old, the carven stone that 
says : 

On this spot once Confucius stood and felt the smallness 
of the world below. 

The stone grows old. 
Eternity 



156 Eunice Tietjens 

Is not for stones. 

But I shall go down from this airy space, this swift white 

peace, this stinging exultation; 
And time will close about me, and my soul stir to the 

rhythm of the daily round. 
Yet, having known, life will not press so close, 
And always I shall feel time ravel thin about me. 
For once I stood 
In the white windy presence of eternity. 

Sara Teasdale 

Sara Teasdale was born August 8, 1884, at St. Louis, Mis- 
souri, and educated there. After leaving school, she traveled 
in Europe and the Near East. In 1914, she married Ernst B. 
Filsinger, who has written several books on foreign trade, and 
moved to New York City in 19 16. 

Her first book was a slight volume, Sonnets to Duse (1907), 
giving little promise of the rich lyricism which was to follow. 
Helen of Troy and Other Poems (1911) contains the first hints 
of that delicate craftsmanship and authentic loveliness which 
this poet has brought to such a high pitch. 

Rivers to the Sea (191 5) emphasizes this poet's singing in- 
tensity as well as her epigrammatic skill. But a greater re- 
straint is here. The new collection contains at least a dozen 
unforgettable snatches, lyrics in which the words seem to fall 
into place without art or effort. Seldom employing metaphor 
or striking imagery, almost bare of ornament, these poems 
have the sheer magic of triumphant song. Theirs is an art- 
lessness that is more than an art. 

Love Songs (1917) is a collection of Miss Teasdale's previ- 
ous melodies for the viola d'amore together with several new 
tunes. Flame and Shadow (1920) is, however, by far the best 
of her books. Here the beauty is fuller and deeper; an almost 
mystic radiance plays from these starry verses. Technically, 
also, this volume marks Miss Teasdale's greatest advance. 
The words are chosen with a keener sense of their actual as 
well as their musical values; the rhythms are much more 
subtle and varied; the line moves with a greater naturalness. 



Sara Teas dale 157 



SPRING NIGHT x 



The park is filled with night and fog, 
The veils are drawn about the world, 

The drowsy lights along the paths 
Are dim and pearled. 



Gold and gleaming the empty streets, 
Gold and gleaming the misty lake. 

The mirrored lights like sunken swords, 
Glimmer and shake. 



Oh, is it not enough to be 

Here with this beauty over me? 

My throat should ache with praise, and I 

Should kneel in joy beneath the sky. 

O beauty, are you not enough? 

Why am I crying after love 

With youth, a singing voice, and eyes 

To take earth's wonder with surprise? 

Why have I put off my pride, 

Why am I unsatisfied, — 

I, for whom the pensive night 

Binds her cloudy hair with light, — 

I, for whom all beauty burns 

Like incense in a million urns? 

O beauty, are you not enough? 

Why am I crying after love? 



1 Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The Macmillan 
Company, from Rivers to the Sea by Sara Teasdale. 



158 Sara Teasdale 



NIGHT SONG AT AMALFI ' 

I asked the heaven of stars 
What I should give my love — 

It answered me with silence, 
Silence above. 

I asked the darkened sea 

Down where the fishermen go — 

It answered me with silence, 
Silence below. 

Oh, I could give him weeping, 
Or I could give him song — 

But how can I give silence 
My whole life long? 

WATER LILIES 2 

If you have forgotten water-lilies floating 

On a dark lake among mountains in the afternoon 
shade, 

If you have forgotten their wet, sleepy fragrance, 
Then you can return and not be afraid. 

But if you remember, then turn away forever 

To the plains and the prairies where pools are far 
apart, 
There you will not come at dusk on closing water lilies, 
And the shadow of mountains will not fall on your 
heart. 

1 Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The Macmillan 
Company, from Love Songs by Sara Teasdale. 

2 Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The Macmillan 
Company, from Flame and Shadow by Sara Teasdale. 



Sara Teas dale 159 

TWO SONGS FOR SOLITUDE 

The Crystal Gazer 

I shall gather myself into myself again, 

I shall take my scattered selves and make them one, 

I shall fuse them into a polished crystal ball 
Where I can see the moon and the flashing sun. 

I shall sit like a sibyl, hour after hour intent, 
Watching the future come and the present go — 

And the little shifting pictures of people rushing 
In tiny self-importance to and fro. 

The Solitary 
Let them think I love them more than I do, 

Let them think I care, though I go alone, 
If it lifts their pride, what is it to me 

Who am self-complete as a flower or a stone? 

It is one to me that they come or go 

If I have myself and the drive of my will, 

And strength to climb on a summer night 
And watch the stars swarm over the hill. 

My heart has grown rich with the passing of years, 
I have less need now than when I was young 

To share myself with every comer, 

Or shape my thoughts into words with my tongue. 

Ezra Pound 

Ezra (Loomis) Pound was born at Hailey, Idaho, October 30, 
1885; attended Hamilton College and the University of Penn- 



160 Ezra Pound 

sylvania and went abroad, seeking fresh material to com- 
plete a thesis on Lope de Vega, in 1908. 

It was in Venice that Pound's first book, A Lume Spento 
(1908), was printed. The following year Pound went to Lon- 
don and the chief poems of the little volume were incorporated 
in Persona (1909), a small collection containing some of 
Pound's finest work. 

Although the young American was a total stranger to the 
English literary world, his book made a definite impression on 
critics of all shades. Edward Thomas, the English poet and 
one of the most careful appraisers, wrote "the beauty of it is 
the beauty of passion, sincerity and intensity, not of beautiful 
words and suggestions. . . . The thought dominates the words 
and is greater than they are." 

Exultations (1909) was printed in the autumn of the same 
year that saw the appearance of Persona. Too often in his 
later work, Pound seems to be more the archaeologist than 
the artist, digging with little energy and less enthusiasm. 
Canzoni (1911) and Ripostes (1912) both contain much that 
is sharp and living; they also contain the germs of desiccation 
and decay. Pound began to scatter his talents; to start move- 
ments which he quickly discarded for new ones; to spend 
himself in poetic propaganda for the Imagists and others (see 
Preface) ; to give more and more time to translation. 

Too special to achieve permanence, too intellectual to become 
popular, Pound's contribution to his age should not be under- 
estimated. He was a pioneer in the new forms; under his 
leadership, the Imagists became not only a group but a protest; 
he helped to make many of the paths which a score of un- 
consciously influenced poets tread to-day with more ease but far 
less grace. 



A VIRGINAL 

No, no! Go from me. I have left her lately. 
I will not spoil my sheath with lesser brightness, 
For my surrounding air has a new lightness; 
Slight are her arms, yet they have bound me straitly 



Ezra Pound 161 

And left me cloaked as with a gauze of aether; 

As with sweet leaves; as with a subtle clearness. 

Oh, I have picked up magic in her nearness 

To sheathe me half in half the things that sheathe her. 

No, no! Go from me. I still have the flavour, 

Soft as spring wind that's come from birchen bowers. 

Green come the shoots, aye April in the branches, 

As winter's wound with her sleight hand she staunches, 

Hath of the trees a likeness of the savour: 

As white their bark, so white this lady's hours. 



BALLAD FOR GLOOM 

For God, our God is a gallant foe 
That playeth behind the veil. 

I have loved my God as a child at heart 
That seeketh deep bosoms for rest, 
I have loved my God as a maid to man — 
But lo, this thing is best: 

To love your God as a gallant foe that plays behind the 

veil; 
To meet your God as the night winds meet beyond 

Arcturus' pale. 

I have played with God for a woman, 
I have staked with my God for truth, 
I have lost to my God as a man, clear-eyed — 

His dice be not of ruth. 
For I am made as a naked blade, 

But hear ye this thing in sooth: 



1 62 Ezra Pound 

Who loseth to God as man to man 

Shall win at the turn of the game. 
I have drawn my blade where the lightnings meet 

But the ending is the same: 
Who loseth to God as the sword blades lose 

Shall win at the end of the game. 

For God, our God is a gallant foe that playeth behind 

the veil. 
Whom God deigns not to overthrow hath need of triple 

mail. 



IN A STATION OF THE METRO 

The apparition of these faces in the crowd ; 
Petals on a wet, black bough. 



h\ Louis Untermeyer 



Louis Untermeyer was born October i, 1885, m New York 
City, where he has lived, except for brief sojourns in Maine 
and New Jersey, ever since. His education was sketchy; his 
continued failure to comprehend algebra and geometry kept 
him from entering college. 

Untermeyer's first volume was The Younger Quire (1911), 
a twenty-four-page burlesque of an anthology ( The Younger 
Choir). It was issued anonymously and only one hundred 
copies were printed. Later in the same year, he published a 
sequence of some seventy lyrics entitled First Love (1911). 
With the exception of about eight of these songs, the volume 
is devoid of character and, in spite of a certain technical 
facility, wholly undistinguished. 

It was with Challenge (1914) that the author first spoke 
in his own idiom. Poems like "Summons," "Landscapes" and 
"Caliban in the Coal Mines" show "a fresh and lyrical con- 
cern not only with a mechanistic society but with the mod- 
ern world." "His vision" (thus the Boston Transcript) "is a 



f 



Louis Untermeyer 163 

social vision, his spirit a passionately energized command of 
the forces of justice." 

Challenge was succeeded by These Times (1917), evidently 
an "interval" book which, lacking the concentration and unity 
of the better known collection, sought for larger horizons. 
The New Adam (1920) is a more satisfactory unit; here the 
varied passions are fused in a new heat. 

Besides this serious poetry, Untermeyer has published three 

volumes of critical parodies: "■ and Other Poets" (1917), 

Including Horace (1919) and Heavens (1922). He has also 
printed a strict metrical translation of three hundred and 
twenty-five Poems of Heinrich Heine (1917) ; a volume of 
prose criticism, The New Era in American Poetry (1919) ; 
and three text-books. He was one of the Associate Editors 
of The Seven Arts (1916-17) and has lectured at various uni- 
versities in the Eastern and Middle Western States. 



CALIBAN IN THE COAL MINES 

God, we don't like to complain 

We know that the mine is no lark — 

But — there's the pools from the rain; 
But — there's the cold and the dark. 

God, You don't know what it is — 
You, in Your well-lighted sky — 

Watching the meteors whizz; 
Warm, with the sun always by. 

God, if You had but the moon 
Stuck in Your cap for a lamp, 

Even You'd tire of it soon, 

Down in the dark and the damp. 

Nothing but blackness above 

And nothing that moves but the cars. 
God, if You wish for our love, 

Fling us a handful of stars! 



164 Louis Untermeyer 



SUMMONS 

The eager night and the impetuous winds, 
The hints and whispers of a thousand lures, 
And all the swift persuasion of the Spring, 
Surged from the stars and stones, and swept me on 
The smell of honeysuckle, keen and clear, 
Startled and shook me, with the sudden thrill 
Of some well-known but half-forgotten voice. 
A slender stream became a naked sprite, 
Flashed around curious bends, and winked at me 
Beyond the turns, alert and mischievous. 
A saffron moon, dangling among the trees, 
Seemed like a toy balloon caught in the boughs, 
Flung there in sport by some too mirthful breeze 

And as it hung there, vivid and unreal, 

The whole world's lethargy was brushed away; 

The night kept tugging at my torpid mood 

And tore it into shreds. A warm air blew 

My wintry slothfulness beyond the stars; 

And over all indifference there streamed 

A myriad urges in one rushing wave . . . 

Touched with the lavish miracles of earth, 
I felt the brave persistence of the grass; 
The far desire of rivulets; the keen, 
Unconquerable fervor of the thrush; 
The endless labors of the patient worm; 
The lichen's strength; the prowess of the ant; 
The constancy of flowers; the blind belief 
Of ivy climbing slowly toward the sun; 
The eternal struggles and eternal deaths — 
And yet the groping faith of every root! 



Louis Untermeyer 165 

Out of old graves arose the cry of life; 
Out of the dying came the deathless call. 
And, thrilling with a new sweet restlessness, 
The thing that was my boyhood woke in me — 
Dear, foolish fragments made me strong again; 
Valiant adventures, dreams of those to come, 
And all the vague, heroic hopes of youth, 
With fresh abandon, like a fearless laugh, 
Leaped up to face the heaven's unconcern. . . . 

And then — veil upon veil was torn aside — 

Stars, like a host of merry girls and boys, 

Danced gaily 'round me, plucking at my hand; 

The night, scorning its stubborn mystery, 

Leaned down and pressed new courage in my heart; 

The hermit-thrush, throbbing with more than Song, 

Sang with a happy challenge to the skies. 

Love and the faces of a world of children 

Swept like a conquering army through my blood. 

And Beauty, rising out of all its forms, 

Beauty, the passion of the universe, 

Flamed with its joy, a thing too great for tears, 

And, like a wine, poured itself out for me 

To drink of, to be warmed with, and to go 

Refreshed and strengthened to the ceaseless fight; 

To meet with confidence the cynic years; 

Battling in wars that never can be won, 

Seeking the lost cause and the brave defeat. 

ON THE BIRTH OF A CHILD 
Lo — to the battle-ground of Life, 



Child, you have come, like a conquering shout, 
Out of a struggle — into strife; 
Out of a darkness — into doubt. 



166 Louis Untermeyer 

Girt with the fragile armor of Youth, 
Child, you must ride into endless wars, 

With the sword of protest, the buckler of truth, 
And a banner of love to sweep the stars. 

About you the world's despair will surge ; 

Into defeat you must plunge and grope — 
Be to the faltering, an urge; 

Be to the hopeless years, a hope! 

Be to the darkened world, a flame; 

Be to its unconcern a blow! 
For out of its pain and tumult you came, 

And into its tumult and pain you go. 



PRAYER 

God, though this life is but a wraith, 
Although we know not what w T e use, 

Although we grope with little faith, 
Give me the heart to fight — and lose. 

Ever insurgent let me be, 

Make me more daring than devout; 
From sleek contentment keep me free, 

And fill me with a buoyant doubt. 

Open my eyes to visions girt 

With beauty, and with wonder lit — 

But let me always see the dirt, 
And all that spawn and die in it. 

Open my ears to music; let 

Me thrill with Spring's first flutes and drums- 
But never let me dare forget 

The bitter ballads of the slums. 



Louis Untermeyer 167 

From compromise and things half-done, 
Keep me, with stern and stubborn pride ; 

And when, at last, the fight is won, 
God, keep me still unsatisfied. 



Jean Starr Untermeyer 

Jean Starr was born at Zanesville, Ohio, May 13, 1886, and 
educated at the Putnam Seminary in the city of her birth. At 
sixteen, she came to New York City, pursuing special studies at 
Columbia. In 1907 she married Louis Untermeyer and, al- 
though she had written some prose previous to the poetic 
renascence, her first volume was published more than ten years 
later. 

Growing Pains (1918) is a thin book of thirty-four poems, 
the result of eight years* slow and self-critical creation. Per- 
fection is almost a passion with her; the first poem in the book 
declares: 

I would rather work in stubborn rock 

All the years of my life; 

And make one strong thing 

And set it in a high, clean place, 

To recall the granite strength of my desire. 

But it is not only her keen search for truth and an equally 
keen eye for the exact word that make these poems distinctive. 
A sharp color sense, a surprising whimsicality, a translation of 
the ordinary in terms of the beautiful, illumine such poems as 
"Sinfonia Domestica," "Clothes," ''Autumn." Her purely 
pictorial poems establish a swift kinship between the most 
romantic and most prosaic objects. The tiny "Moonrise" is 
an example; so is "High Tide," that, in one extended metaphor, 
turns the mere fact of a physical law into an arresting and 
noble fancy. 

Dreams Out of Darkness (1921) is a ripening of this author's 
powers with a richer musical undercurrent. This increase of 
melody is manifest on every page, possibly most obvious iff 
the persuasive music and symbolism of "Lake Song." 



:68 Jean Starr Untermeyer 

HIGH TIDE 

I edged back against the night. 

The sea growled assault on the wave-bitten shore. 

And the breakers, 

Like young and impatient hounds, 

Sprang with rough joy on the shrinking sand. 

Sprang — but were drawn back slowly 

With a long, relentless pull, 

Whimpering, into the dark. 

Then I saw who held them captive; 

And I saw how they were bound 

With a broad and quivering leash of light, 

Held by the moon, 

As, calm and unsmiling, 

She walked the deep fields of the sky. 



AUTUMN 

{To My Mother) 

How memory cuts away the years, 
And how clean the picture comes 
Of autumn days, brisk and busy; 
Charged with keen sunshine. 
And you, stirred with activity, 
The spirit of those energetic days. 

There was our back-yard, 

So plain and stripped of green, 

With even the weeds carefully pulled away 

From the crooked red bricks that made the walk, 

And the earth on either side so black. 



Jean Starr Untermeyer 169 

Autumn and dead leaves burning in the sharp air. 

And winter comforts coming in like a pageant. 

I shall not forget them: — 

Great jars laden with the raw green of pickles, 

Standing in a solemn row across the back of the porch, 

Exhaling the pungent dill; 

And in the very center of the yard, 

You, tending the great catsup kettle of gleaming copper, 

Where fat, red tomatoes bobbed up and down 

Like jolly monks in a drunken dance. 

And there were bland banks of cabbages that came by 
the wagon-load, 

Soon to be cut into delicate ribbons 

Only to be crushed by the heavy, wooden stompers. 

Such feathery whiteness — to come to kraut! 

And after, there were grapes that hid their brightness 
under a grey dust, 

Then gushed thrilling, purple blood over the fire; 

And enamelled crab-apples that tricked w T ith their fra- 
grance 

But were bitter to taste. 

And there were spicy plums and ill-shaped quinces, 

And long string beans floating in pans of clear water 

Like slim, green fishes. 

And there was fish itself, 

Salted, silver herring from the city. . . . 

And you moved among these mysteries, 

Absorbed and smiling and sure; 

Stirring, tasting, measuring, 

With the precision of a ritual. 

I like to think of you in your years of power — 

You, now r so shaken and so powerless — 

High priestess of your home. 



170 Jean Starr Untermeyer 



LAKE SONG 

The lapping of lake water 
Is like the weeping of women, 
The weeping of ancient women 
Who grieved without rebellion. 

The lake falls over the shore 
Like tears on their curven bosoms. 
Here is languid, luxurious wailing; 
The wailing of kings' daughters. 

So do we ever cry, 

A soft, unmutinous crying, 

When we know ourselves each a princess 

Locked fast within her tower. 

The lapping of lake water 
Is like the weeping of women, 
The fertile tears of women 
That water the dreams of men. 



John Gould Fletcher 

John Gould Fletcher was born at Little Rock, Arkansas, 
January 3, 1886. He was educated at Phillips Academy 
(Andover, Massachusetts) and Harvard (1903-7) and, after 
spending several years in Massachusetts, moved to England, 
where, except for brief visits to the United States, he has lived 
ever since. 

In 1913, Fletcher published five tiny books of poems which 
he has referred to as "his literary wild oats," five small collec- 
tions of experimental and faintly interesting verse. Two years 
later, Fletcher appeared as a decidedly less conservative and 
far more arresting poet with Irradiations — Sand and Spray 



John Gould Fletcher 171 

(1915). This volume is full of an extraordinary fancy; 
imagination riots through it, even though it is often a bloodless 
and bodiless imagination. 

In the following book, Goblins and Pagodas (1916), Fletcher 
carries his unrelated harmonies much further. Color dominates 
him; the ambitious set of eleven "color symphonies" is an 
elaborate design in which the tone as well as the thought is 
summoned by color-associations, sometimes closely related, 
sometimes far-fetched. 

Meanwhile, Fletcher had been developing. After having ap- 
peared in the three Imagist anthologies, he sought for depths 
rather than surfaces. Beginning with his majestic "Lincoln," 
his work has had a closer relation to humanity; a moving 
mysticism speaks from The Tree of Life (1918), the more 
native Granite and Breakers (1921) and the later uncollected 
poems. 



LONDON NIGHTFALL 

I saw the shapes that stood upon the clouds: 
And they were tiger-breasted, shot with light, 
And all of them, lifting long trumpets together, 
Blew over the city, for the night to come. 
Down in the street, we floundered in the mud; 
Above, in endless files, gold angels came 
And stood upon the clouds, and blew their horns 
For night. 

Like a wet petal crumpled, 

Twilight fell soddenly on the weary city; 

The 'buses lurched and groaned, 

The shops put up their doors. 

But skywards, far aloft, 

The angels, vanishing, waved broad plumes of gold, 

Summoning spirits from a thousand hills 

To pour the thick night out upon the earth. 



172 John Gould Fletcher 



FROM "IRRADIATIONS" 

The trees, like great jade elephants, 

Chained, stamp and shake 'neath the gadflies of the breeze ; 

The trees lunge and plunge, unruly elephants: 

The clouds are their crimson howdah-canopies ; 

The sunlight glints like the golden robe of a Shah. 

Would I were tossed on the wrinkled backs of those trees. 



LINCOLN * 



Like a gaunt, scraggly pine 

Which lifts its head above the mournful sandhills; 
And patiently, through dull years of bitter silence, 
Untended and uncared for, begins to grow. 

Ungainly, labouring, huge, 

The wind of the north has twisted and gnarled its 

branches ; 
Yet in the heat of midsummer days, when thunder-clouds 

ring the horizon, 
A nation of men shall rest beneath its shade. 



And it shall protect them all, 
Hold everyone safe there, watching aloof in silence; 
Until at last one mad stray bolt from the zenith 
Shall strike it in an instant down to earth. 

1 See pages 54, 78, 84, 139, 142. 



John Gould Fletcher 173 



11 

There was a darkness in this man ; an immense and hol- 
low darkness, 

Of which we may not speak, nor share with him, nor 
enter ; 

A darkness through which strong roots stretched down- 
wards into the earth 

Towards old things; 

Towards the herdman-kings who walked the earth and 
spoke with God, 

Towards the wanderers who sought for they knew not 
what, and found their goal at last ; 

Towards the men who waited, only waited patiently 
when all seemed lost, 

Many bitter winters of defeat; 

Down to the granite of patience 

These roots swept, knotted fibrous roots, prying, piercing, 
seeking, 

And drew from the living rock and the living waters 
about it 

The red sap to carry upwards to the sun. 

Not proud, but humble, 

Only to serve and pass on, to endure to the end through 

service ; 
For the ax is laid at the root of the trees, and all that 

bring not forth good fruit 
Shall be cut down on the day to come and cast into the 

fire. 

in 

There is silence abroad in the land today, 

And in the hearts of men, a deep and anxious silence; 



174 John Gould Fletcher 

And, because we are still at last, those bronze lips slowly 

open, 
Those hollow and weary eyes take on a gleam of light. 

Slowly a patient, firm-syllabled voice cuts through the 

endless silence 
Like labouring oxen that drag a plow through the chaos 

of rude clay-fields: 
"I wetit forward as the light goes forward in early 

spring, 
But there were also many things which I left behind. 

"Tombs that were quiet; 

One, of a mother, whose brief light went out in the 

darkness, 
One, of a loved one, the snow on whose grave is long 

falling, 
One, only of a child, but it was mine. 

"Have you forgot your graves? Go, question them in 

anguish, 
Listen long to their unstirred lips. From your hostages 

to silence, 
Learn there is no life without death, no dawn without 

sun-setting, 
No victory but to Him who has given all." 

IV 

The clamour of cannon dies down, the furnace-mouth 

of the battle is silent. 
The midwinter sun dips and descends, the earth takes 

on afresh its bright colours. 
But he whom we mocked and obeyed not, he whom we 

scorned and mistrusted, 
He has descended, like a god, to his rest 



John Gould Fletcher 175 

Over the uproar of cities, 

Over the million intricate threads of life wavering and 
crossing, 

In the midst of problems we know not, tangling, per- 
plexing, ensnaring, 

Rises one white tomb alone. 

Beam over it, stars. 

Wrap it round, stripes — stripes red for the pain that he 

bore for you — 
Enfold it forever, O flag, rent, soiled, but repaired 

through your anguish; 
Long as you keep him there safe, the nations shall bow 

to your law. 

Strew over him flowers; 

Blue forget-me-nots from the north, and the bright pink 

arbutus 
From the east, and from the west rich orange blossoms, 
But from the heart of the land take the passion-flower. 

Rayed, violet, dim, 

With the nails that pierced, the cross that he bore and 
the circlet, 

And beside it there, lay also one lonely snow-white mag- 
nolia, 

Bitter for remembrance of the healing which has passed. 



THE SKATERS 

Black swallows swooping or gliding 

In a flurry of entangled loops and curves; 

The skaters skim over the frozen riven 



176 



John Gould Fletcher 



And the grinding click of their skates as they impinge 

upon the surface, 
Is like the brushing together of thin wing-tips of silver. 

"H. D." 

Hilda Doolittle was born September 10, 1886, at Bethlehem, 
Pennsylvania. When she was still a child, her father became 
Director of the Flower Observatory and the family moved to 
a suburb in the outskirts of Philadelphia. Hilda Doolittle at- 
tended a private school in West Philadelphia; entered Bryn 
Mawr College in 1904, and went abroad, for what was in- 
tended to be a short sojourn, in 191 1. After a visit to Italy 
and France, she came to London, joining Ezra Pound and 
helping to organize the Imagists. Her work (signed "H. D.") 
began to appear in a few magazines and its unusual quality 
was recognized at once. She married one of the most talented 
of the English members of this group (Richard Aldington) in 
1913 and remained in London. 

Her first volume, Sea Garden, appeared in 1916; her second, 
Hymen, an amplification of her gift, was published in 1921. 

"H. D." is, by all odds, the most important of her group. 
She is the only one who has steadfastly held to the letter as 
well as to the spirit of its credo. She is, in fact, the only true 
Imagist. Her poems, capturing the firm delicacy of the Greek 
models, are like a set of Tanagra figurines. Here, at first 
glance, the effect is chilling — beauty seems held in a frozen 
gesture. But it is in this very fixation of light, color and emo- 
tion that she achieves intensity. 

Observe the tiny poem entitled "Heat." Here, in the fewest 
possible words, is something beyond the description of heat — 
here is the effect of it. In these lines one feels the very weight 
and solidity of a midsummer afternoon. 



OREAD 



Whirl up, sea — 

Whirl your pointed pines. 



H. D." 177 



Splash your great pines 

On our rocks. 

Hurl your green over us — 

Cover us with your pools of fir. 



HEAT 

O wind, rend open the heat, 
cut apart the heat, 
rend it to tatters. 

Fruit cannot drop 
through this thick air — 
fruit cannot fall into heat 
that presses up and blunts 
the points of pears 
and rounds the grapes. 

Cut through the heat — 
plough through it, 
turning it on either side 
of your path. 



PEAR TREE 

Silver dust 

lifted from the earth, 

higher than my arms reach, 

you have mounted. 

O silver, 

higher than my arms reach 

you front us with great mass ; 



178 "H. D." 

no flower ever opened 
so staunch a white leaf, 
no flower ever parted silver 
from such rare silver; 



O white pear, 

your flower-tufts, 

thick on the branch, 

bring summer and ripe fruits 

in their purple hearts. 



William Rose Benet 

William Rose Benet was born at Fort Hamilton, New York 
Harbor, February 2, 1886. He was educated at Albany Acad- 
emy and graduated from Yale in 1907. After various experi- 
ences as free-lance writer, publisher's reader, second lieu- 
tenant, etc., Benet became the Associate Editor of the New 
York Post's Literary Review in 1920. 

The outstanding feature of Benet's verse is its extraordinary 
whimsicality; an oriental imagination riots through his pages. 
Like the title-poem of his first volume, Merchants from Cathay 
(1913), all of Benet's volumes vibrate with a vigorous music; 
they are full of the sonorous stuff that one rolls out crossing 
wintry fields or tramping a road alone. 

But Benet's charm is not confined to the lift and swing of 
rollicking choruses. His The Falconer of God (1914), The 
Great White Wall (191 6) and The Burglar of the Zodiac 
(1918) contain decorations as bold as they are brilliant; they 
ring with a strange and spicy music evoked from seemingly 
casual words. 

Moons of Grandeur (1920) represents the fullest development 
of Benet's unusual gifts; a combination of Eastern phantasy and 
Western vigor. 



William Rose Benet 



179 



How that 
They came. 



MERCHANTS FROM CATHAY 

Their heels slapped their bumping mules; 
their fat chaps glowed. 
Glory unto Mary, each seemed to wear 



Of their 
Beasts, 



And their 
Boast, 



With its 
Burthen 



a crown 



Like sunset their robes were on the wide, 
white road: 
So we saw those mad merchants come 
dusting into town! 

Two paunchy beasts they rode on and 
two they drove before. 
May the Saints all help us, the tiger- 
stripes they had! 
And the panniers upon them swelled full 
of stuffs and ore! 
The square buzzed and jostled at a 
sight so mad. 

They bawled in their beards, and their 
turbans they wried. 
They stopped by the stalls with curvet- 
ting and clatter. 
As bronze as the bracken their necks and 
faces dyed — 
And a stave they sat singing, to tell us 
of the matter. 

"For your silks to Sugarmago! For your 
dyes to Isfahan! 
Weird fruits from the Isle 0' Lamaree. 
But for magic merchandise, for 
treasure-trove and spice, 



i8o 



William Rose Benet 



And 
Chorus. 



A iirst 

Stave 

Fearsome, 



And a second 
Right hard 
To stomach 



And a third, 
Which is a 
Laughable 
Thing. 



Here's a catch and a carol to the great, 
grand Chan, 
The King of all the Kings across the 
sea! 

"Here's a catch and a carol to the great, 

grand Chan; 
For we won through the deserts to his 

sunset barbican; 
And the mountains of his palace no 

Titan s reach may span 
Where he wields his seignorie! 

"Red-as-blood skins of Panthers, so bright 
against the sun 
On the walls of the halls where his 
pillared state is set 
They daze with a blaze no man may look 
upon. 
And with conduits of beverage those 
floors run wet. 

"His wives stiff with riches, they sit be- 
fore him there. 
Bird and beast at his feast make song 
and clapping cheer. 
And jugglers and enchanters, all walking 
on the air, 
Make fall eclipse and thunder— make 
moons and suns appear! 

"Once the Chan, by his enemies sore- 
prest, and sorely spent, 
Lay, sc they say, in a thicket 'neath a 
tree 



William Rose Benet 



181 



We gape to 
Hear them end, 



And are in 
Terror, 



And dread 

it is 
Devil's Work! 



Where the howl of an owl vexed his foes 
from their intent: 
Then that fowl for a holy bird of rev- 
erence made he! 

"A catch and a carol to the great, grand 
Chan I 

Pastmmters of disasters, our desert cara- 
van 

Won through all peril to his sunset bar- 
bican, 
Where he wields his seignorie! 

And crowns he gave us! We end where 
we began: 

A catch and a carol to the great, grand 
Chan, 
The King of all the Kings across the 
sea! 

Those mad, antic Merchants! . . . Their 
striped beasts did beat 
The market-square suddenly with hooves 
of beaten gold! 
The ground yawned gaping and flamed 
beneath our feet! 
They plunged to Pits Abysmal with 
their wealth untold ! 

And some say the Chan himself in anger 
dealt the stroke — 

For sharing of his secrets with silly, com- 
mon folk: 

But Holy, Blessed Maty, preserve us as 
you may 

Lest once more those mad Merchants 
come chanting from Cathay! 



182 William Rose Benet 



HOW TO CATCH UNICORNS 

Its cloven hoofprint on the sand 

Will lead you — where? 

Into a phantasmagoric land — 



There all the bright streams run up-hill. 
The birds on every tree are still. 
But from stocks and stones, clear voices come 
That should be dumb. 

If you have taken along a net, 

A noose, a prod, 

You'll be waiting in the forest yet . . . 

Nid — nod! 

In a virgin's lap the beast slept sound, 
They say . . . but I — 
I think (Is anyone around?) 
That's just a lie! 

If you have taken a musketoon 
To flinders 'twill flash 'neath the wizard moon. 
So I should take browned batter-cake, 
Hot-buttered inside, like foam to flake. 

And I should take an easy heart 

And a whimsical face, 

And a tied-up lunch of sandwich and tart, 

And spread a cloth in the open chase. 

And then I should pretend to snore . . . 
And I'd hear a snort and I'd hear a roar, 



William Rose Benet 183 

The wind of a mane and a tail, and four 
Wild hoofs prancing the forest-floor. 
And I'd open my eyes on a flashing horn — 
And see the Unicorn! 

Paladins fierce and virgins sweet . . . 
But he's never had anything to eat! 
Knights have tramped in their iron-mong'ry . . . 
But nobody thought — that's all! — he's hungry! 

ADDENDUM 

Really hungry! Good Lord deliver us, 
The Unicorn is not carnivorous ! 



John Hall Wheelock 

John Hall Wheelock was born at Far Rockaway, Long Island, 
in 1886. He was graduated from Harvard, receiving his 
B.A. in 1908, and finished his studies at the Universities of 
Gottingen and Berlin, 1908-10. 

Wheelock's first book is, in many respects, his best. The 
Human Fantasy (1911) sings with the voice of youth — a youth 
which is vibrantly in love with existence. Rhapsodic and 
obviously influenced by Whitman and Henley, these lines beat 
bravely. A headlong ecstasy rises from pages whose refrain 
is "Splendid it is to live and glorious to die." 



SUNDAY EVENING IN THE COMMON 

Look — on the topmost branches of the world 
The blossoms of the myriad stars are thick; 
Over the huddled rows of stone and brick, 

A few, sad wisps of empty smoke are curled 
Like ghosts, languid and sick. 







184 John Hall Wheelock 

One breathless moment now the city's moaning 
Fades, and the endless streets seem vague and dim ; 
There is no sound around the whole world's rim, 

Save in the distance a small band is droning 
Some desolate old hymn. 

Van Wyck, how often have we been together 

When this same moment made all mysteries clear ; 
— The infinite stars that brood above us here, 

And the gray city in the soft June weather, 
So tawdry and so dear! 



LOVE AND LIBERATION 

Lift your arms to the stars 
And give an immortal shout; 
Not all the veils of darkness 
Can put your beauty out! 

You are armed with love, with love, 
Nor all the powers of Fate 
Can touch you with a spear, 
Nor all the hands of hate. 

What of good and evil, 
Hell and Heaven above — , 
Trample them with love! 
Ride over them with love! 



Joyce Kilmer 

(Alfred) Joyce Kilmer was born at New Brunswick, New 
Jersey, December 6, 1886. He was graduated from Rutgers 
College in 1904 and received his A.B. from Columbia in 1906. 



Joyce Kilmer 185 

In 1917 Kilmer joined the Officers' Reserve Training Corps, 
but he soon resigned from this. In less than three weeks after 
America entered the world war, he enlisted as a private in 
the Seventh Regiment, National Guard, New York. 

On July 28, 1918, the five-day battle for the mastery of the 
heights beyond the river Ourcq was begun. Two days later, 
Sergeant Kilmer was killed in action. 

Death came before the poet had developed or even ma- 
tured his gifts. His first volume, Summer of Love (1911), is 
wholly imitative; it is full of reflections of a dozen other 
sources, "a broken bundle of mirrors." Trees and Other Poems 
(1914) contains the title-poem by which Kilmer is best known 
and, though various influences are here, a refreshing candor 
lights up the lines. Main Street and Other Poems (1917) is 
less derivative ; the simplicity is less self-conscious, the ecstasy 
more spontaneous. 

TREES ' 

I think that I shall never see 
A poem lovely as a tree. 

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest 
Against the sweet earth's flowing breast ; 

A tree that looks at God all day, 
And lifts her leafy arms to pray; 

A tree that may in summer wear 
A nest of robins in her hair; 

Upon whose bosom snow has lain; 
Who intimately lives with rain. 

Poems are made by fools like me, 
But only God can make a tree. 

1 From Trees and Other Poems by Joyce Kilmer. Copy- 
right, 1914, by George H. Doran Company, Publishers. 



1 86 Joyce Kilmer 

MARTIN 1 

When I am tired of earnest men, 

Intense and keen and sharp and clever, 
Pursuing fame with brush or pen 

Or counting metal discs forever, 
Then from the halls of shadowland 

Beyond the trackless purple sea 
Old Martin's ghost comes back to stand 

Beside my desk and talk to me. 

Still on his delicate pale face 

A quizzical thin smile is showing, 
His cheeks are wrinkled like fine lace, 

His kind blue eyes are gay and glowing. 
He wears a brilliant-hued cravat, 

A suit to match his soft gray hair, 
A rakish stick, a knowing hat, 

A manner blithe and debonair. 

How good, that he who always knew 

That being lovely was a duty, 
Should have gold halls to wander through 

And should himself inhabit beauty. 
How like his old unselfish way 

To leave those halls of splendid mirth 
And comfort those condemned to stay 

Upon the bleak and sombre earth. 

Some people ask: What cruel chance 
Made Martin's life so sad a story? 

Martin? Why, he exhaled romance 
And wore an overcoat of glory. 

1 From Trees and Other Poems by Joyce Kilmer. Copy- 
right, 1 914, by George H. Doran Company, Publishers, 



Joyce Kilmer 187 

A fleck of sunlight in the street, 

A horse, a book, a girl who smiled, — 

Such visions made each moment sweet 
For this receptive, ancient child* 

Because it was old Martin's lot 

To be, not make, a decoration, 
Shall we then scorn him, having not 

His genius of appreciation? 
Rich joy and love he got and gave; 

His heart was merry as his dress. 
Pile laurel wreaths upon his grave 

Who did not gain, but was, success. 



Orrick Johns 

Orrick Johns was born at St. Louis, Missouri, in 1887. He 
schooled himself to be an advertising copy writer, his creative 
work being kept as an avocation. 

Asphalt and Other Poems (1917) is a queer mixture. Cheap 
stanzas crowd against lines of singular beauty. The same 
peculiarity is evident in Black Branches (1920), where much 
that is strained and artificial mingles with poetry that is not 
only spontaneous but searching. At his best, notably in the 
refreshing "Country Rhymes," Johns is a true and poignant 
singer. 

THE INTERPRETER 

In the very early morning when the light was low 

She got all together and she went like snow, 

Like snow in the springtime on a sunny hill, 

And we were only frightened and can't think still. 

We can't think quite that the katydids and frogs 

And the little crying chickens and the little grunting hogs, 



1 88 Orrick Johns 

And the other living things that she spoke for to us 
Have nothing more to tell her since it happened thus. 

She never is around for anyone to touch, 
But of ecstasy and longing she too knew much . . . 
And always when anyone has time to call his own, 
She will come and be beside him as quiet as a stone. 



Alan Seeger 

Alan Seeger was born in New York, June 22, 1888. When 
he was still a baby, his parents moved to Staten Island, where 
he remained through boyhood. Later, there were several other 
migrations, including a sojourn in Mexico, where Seeger spent 
the most impressionable years of his youth. In 1906, he entered 
Harvard. 

1914 came, and the European war had not entered its third 
week when, along with some forty of his fellow-countrymen, 
Seeger enlisted in the Foreign Legion of France. He was in 
action almost continually, serving on various fronts. On the 
fourth of July, 1916, ordered to take the village of Belloy-en- 
Santerre, Seeger advanced in the first rush with his squad which 
was practically wiped out by hidden machine-gun fire. Seeger 
fell, mortally wounded, and died the next morning. 

Seeger's literary promise was far greater than his poetic 
accomplishment. With the exception of his one famous poem, 
there is little of importance, though much of charm, in his 
collected Poems (published, with an Introduction by William 
Archer, in 1916). 

"I HAVE A RENDEZVOUS WITH DEATH" x 

I have a rendezvous with Death 

At some disputed barricade, 

When Spring comes back with rustling shade 

1 From Poems by Alan Seeger. Copyright, 1916, by Charles 
Scribner's Sons. By permission of the publishers. 



Alan Seeger 189 

■ 

And apple-blossoms fill the air — 

I have a rendezvous with Death 

When Spring brings back blue days and fair. 

It may be he shall take my hand 

And lead me into his dark land 

And close my eyes and quench my breath — 

It may be I shall pass him still. 

I have a rendezvous with Death 

On some scarred slope of battered hill, 

When Spring comes round again this year 

And the first meadow-flowers appear. 

God knows 'twere better to be deep 
Pillowed in silk and scented down, 
Where love throbs out in blissful sleep, 
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath, 
Where hushed awakenings are dear . . . 
But I've a rendezvous with Death 
At midnight in some flaming town, 
When Spring trips north again this year, 
And I to my pledged word am true, 
I shall not fail that rendezvous. 



Margaret Widdemer 

Margaret Widdemer was born at Doylestown, Pennsylvania, 
and began writing in her childhood. After graduating from 
Drexel Institute Library School in 1909, she contributed to vari- 
ous magazines. 

Miss Widdemer's poetic work has two distinct phases. In 
the one mood, she is the protesting poet, the champion of the 
down-trodden, the lyricist on fire with angry passion. In the 
other, she is the writer of well-made, polite and popular 
sentimental verse. Her finest poems are in Factories with Other 
Lyrics (1915), although several of her best songs are in The 



190 Margaret Widdemer 

Old Road to Paradise (1918), which divided, with Sandburg's 
Cornhuskers, the Columbia Poetry Prize in 1918. A new volume, 
Cross Currents, appeared in 1921. 

Miss Widdemer is also the author of two books of short 
stories, four novels and several books for girls. 

FACTORIES 

I have shut my little sister in from life and light 

(For a rose, for a ribbon, for a wreath across my hair), 

I have made her restless feet still until the night, 

Locked from sweets of summer and from wild spring 
air; 

I who ranged the meadowlands, free from sun to sun, 
Free to sing and pull the buds and watch the far wings 

fly, 

I have bound my sister till her playing time was done — 
Oh, my little sister, was it I ? Was it I ? 

I have robbed my sister of her day of maidenhood 

(For a robe, for a feather, for a trinket's restless spark), 

Shut from love till dusk shall fall, how shall she know 
good, 
How shall she go scatheless through the sun-lit dark? 

I who could be innocent, I who could be gay, 

I who could have love and mirth before the light went 

by, 

I have put my sister in her mating-time away — 
Sister, my young sister, was it I ? Was it I ? 

I have robbed my sister of the lips against her breast, 
(For a coin, for the weaving of my children's lace 
and lawn), 
Feet that pace beside the loom, hands that cannot rest — 
How can she know motherhood, whose strength is 
gone? 



Margaret Widdemer 191 

I who took no heed of her, starved and labor-worn, 
I, against whose placid heart my sleepy gold-heads lie, 

Round my path they cry to me, little souls unborn — 
God of Life! Creator! It was I! It was I! 



THE WATCHER 

She always leaned to watch for us, 

Anxious if we were late, 
In winter by the window, 

In summer by the gate; 

And though we mocked her tenderly, 

Who had such foolish care, 
The long way home would seem more safe 

Because she waited there. 

Her thoughts were all so full of us, 

She never could forget! 
And so I think that where she is 

She must be watching yet, 

Waiting till we come home to her, 

Anxious if we are late — 
Watching from Heaven's window, 

Leaning from Heaven's gate. 



Aline Kilmer 

Aline (Murray) Kilmer was born in Norfolk, Virginia, in 
1888. She was married to Joyce Kilmer in 1908 and, after 
his death during battle in France, began to deliver lectures, 
beginning in 1917. Since her youth, she has lived in New York. 

Candles That Burn (1919) reveals a personal as well as 



192 Aline Kilmer 

poetic warmth. Here is a domesticated flame, a quiet but none 
the less colorful hearth-fire. By its light, her world is revealed 
with a quaintly individualized grace. Her poems about her 
children are particularly well characterized. Vigils (1921) is 
a more ambitious and even more original offering. The nimble 
dexterity of "Unlearning," the banter of "Perversity" and the 
clean fervor of "Things" display Mrs. Kilmer as a distinct 
poetic personality. 



EXPERIENCE 

Deborah danced, when she was two, 

As buttercups and daffodils do; 

Spirited, frail, naively bold, 

Her hair a ruffled crest of gold. 

And whenever she spoke her voice went singing 

Like water up from a fountain springing. 

But now her step is quiet and slow; 
She walks the way primroses go; 
Her hair is yellow instead of gilt, 
Her voice is losing its lovely lilt; 
And in place of her wild, delightful ways 
A quaint precision rules her days. 

For Deborah now is three, and, oh, 

She knows so much that she did not know. 



THINGS 

Sometimes when I am at tea with you, 

I catch my breath 
At a thought that is old as che world is old 

And more bitter than death. 



Aline Kilmer 193 

It is that the spoon that you just laid down 

And the cup that you hold 
May be here shining and insolent 

When you are still and cold. 

Your careless note that I laid away 

May leap to my eyes like flame, 
When the world has almost forgotten your voice 

Or the sound of your name. 

The golden Virgin da Vinci drew 

May smile on over my head, 
And daffodils nod in the silver vase 

When you are dead. 

So let moth and dust corrupt and thieves 

Break through and I shall be glad, 
Because of the hatred I bear to things 

Instead of the love I had. 

For life seems only a shuddering breath, 

A smothered, desperate cry; 
And things have a terrible permanence 

When people die. 



Elinor Wylie 

Elinor Wylie was born in Somerville, New Jersey, but she 
is, she protests, completely a Pennsylvanian by parentage. She 
wrote from her infancy until her maturity and then, for the pro- 
verbial seven years, did not write a word. 

Nets to Catch the Wind (1921) is one of the most brilliant 
first volumes recently issued in America. Mrs. Wylie's bril- 
liance, it must be added, is one which always sparkles but seldom 
burns. Too often she achieves a frigid ecstasy; emotion is 
never absent from her lines but frequently it reflects a passion 
frozen at its source. For the most part, she exhibits a dramatic 



194 Elinor Wylie 

keenness, a remarkable precision of word and gesture. A poem 
like "The Eagle and the Mole" is notable not only for its 
incisive symbolism but for its firm outlines and bright clarity 
of speech. 



THE EAGLE AND THE MOLE 

Avoid the reeking herd, 
Shun the polluted flock, 
Live like that stoic bird, 
The eagle of the rock. 

The huddled warmth of crowds 
Begets and fosters hate; 
He keeps, above the clouds, 
His cliff inviolate. 

When flocks are folded warm, 
And herds to shelter run, 
He sails above the storm, 
He stares into the sun. 

If in the eagle's track 
Your sinews cannot leap, 
Avoid the lathered pack, 
Turn from the steaming sheep. 

If you would keep your soul 
From spotted sight or sound, 
Live like the velvet mole; 
Go burrow underground. 

And there hold intercourse 
With roots of trees and stones, 
With rivers at their source, 
And disembodied bones. 



Elinor Wylie 195 



SEA LULLABY 

The old moon is tarnished 
With smoke of the flood, 
The dead leaves are varnished 
With color like blood, 

A treacherous smiler 
With teeth white as milk, 
A savage beguiler 
In sheathings of silk, 

The sea creeps to pillage, 
She leaps on her prey; 
A child of the village 
Was murdered today. 

She came up to meet him 
In a smooth golden cloak, 
She choked him and beat him 
To death, for a joke. 

Her bright locks were tangled, 
She shouted for joy, 
With one hand she strangled 
A strong little boy. 

Now in silence she lingers 
Beside him all night 
To wash her long fingers 
In silvery light. 

Conrad Aiken 

Conrad (Potter) Aiken was born at Savannah, Georgia, 
August 5, 1889. He attended Harvard, receiving his A.B. in 



196 



Conrad Aiken 



1912, travelled extensively for three years, and since then, he 
has devoted all his time to literature, living at South Yarmouth, 
Massachusetts. 

The most outstanding feature of Aiken's creative work is its 
adaptations of other models transmuted by Aiken's own music. 
His first volume, Earth Triumphant and Other Tales in Verse 
(1914), is the Keats tradition crossed and paraphrased by 
Masefield. Turns and Movies (1916) is a complete change; 
in more than half of this book, Aiken begins to speak with his 
true voice. Here he is the natural musician, playing with new 
rhythms, haunting cadences, muted philosophy. 

Nocturne of Remembered Spring (1917), The Charnel Rose 
(1918) and The House of Dust (1920) are packed with a tired 
but often beautiful music. Primarily, a lyric poet, Aiken 
frequently condenses an emotion in a few lines; some of his 
best moments are these "lapses" into tune. The music of the 
Morning Song from "Senlin" (in The Charnel Rose) is rich 
with subtleties of rhythm. But it is much more than a lyrical 
movement. Beneath the flow and flexibility of these lines, there 
is a delightful whimsicality, an extraordinary summoning of 
the immensities that loom behind the casual moments of every- 
day. 

Punch, the Immortal Liar (1921), in many ways Aiken's most 
appealing work, contains this poet's sharpest characterizations as 
well as his most beautiful symphonic effects. 



MIRACLES 

Twilight is spacious, near things in it seem far, 
And distant things seem near. 
Now in the green west hangs a yellow star. 
And now across old waters you may hear 
The profound gloom of bells among still trees, 
Like a rolling of huge boulders beneath seas. 

Silent as thought in evening contemplation 
Weaves the bat under the gathering stars. 
Silent as dew, we seek new incarnation, 
Meditate new avatars. 



Conrad Aiken 197 

In a clear dusk like this 
Mary climbed up the hill to seek her son, 
To lower him down from the cross, and kiss 
The mauve wounds, every one. 

Men with wings 

In the dusk walked softly after her. 

She did not see them, but may have felt 

The winnowed air around her stir; 

She did not see them, but may have known 

Why her son's body was light as a little stone. 

She may have guessed that other hands were there 

Moving the watchful air. 

Now, unless persuaded by searching music 

Which suddenly opens the portals of the mind, 

We guess no angels, 

And are contented to be blind. 

Let us blow silver horns in the twilight, 

And lift our hearts to the yellow star in the green, 

To find perhaps, if, while the dew is rising, 

Clear things may not be seen. 



PORTRAIT OF A GIRL 

This is the shape of the leaf, and this of the flower, 
And this the pale bole of the tree 

Which watches its bough in a pool of unwavering water 
In a land we never shall see. 

The thrush on the bough is silent, the dew falls softly, 
In the evening is hardly a sound. . . . 
And the three beautiful pilgrims who come here together 
Touch lightly the dust of the ground. 



198 Conrad Aiken 

Touch it with feet that trouble the dust but as wings do, 
Come shyly together, are still, 

Like dancers, who wait, in a pause of the music, for music 
The exquisite silence to fill . . . 

This is the thought of the first, and this of the second, 
And this the grave thought of the third: 
"Linger we thus for a moment, palely expectant, 
And silence will end, and the bird 

"Sing the pure phrase, sweet phrase, clear phrase in the 

twilight 
To fill the blue bell of the world; 

And we, who on music so leaflike have drifted together, 
Leaflike apart shall be whirled 

"Into what but the beauty of silence, silence forever? . . ." 

. . . This is the shape of the tree, 

And the flower and the leaf, and the three pale beautiful 

pilgrims: 
This is what you are to me. 



MORNING SONG FROM "SENLIN" 

It is morning, Senlin says, and in the morning 

When the light drips through the shutters like the dew, 

I arise, I face the sunrise, 

And do the things my fathers learned to do. 

Stars in the purple dusk above the rooftops 

Pale in a saffron mist and seem to die, 

And I myself on a swiftly tilting planet 

Stand before a glass and tie my tie. 

Vine-leaves tap my window, 
Dew-drops sing to the garden stones, 



Conrad Aiken 199 

The robin chirps in the chinaberry tree 
Repeating three clear tones. 

It is morning. I stand by the mirror 

And tie my tie once more. 

While waves far off in a pale rose twilight 

Crash on a white sand shore. 

I stand by a mirror and comb my hair: 

How small and white my face! — 

The green earth tilts through a sphere of air 

And bathes in a flame of space. 

There are houses hanging above the stars 

And stars hung under a sea . . . 

And a sun far off in a shell of silence 

Dapples my walls for me. . . . 

It is morning, Senlin says, and in the morning 
Should I not pause in the light to remember God ? 
Upright and firm I stand on a star unstable, 
He is immense and lonely as a cloud. 
I will dedicate this moment before my mirror 
To him alone, for him I will comb my hair. 
Accept these humble offerings, clouds of silence! 
I will think of you as I descend the stair. 

Vine-leaves tap my window, 
The snail-track shines on the stones; 
Dew-drops flash from the chinaberry tree 
Repeating two clear tones. 

It is morning, I awake from a bed of silence, 
Shining I rise from the starless waters of sleep. 
The walls are about me still as in the evening, 
I am the same, and the same name still I keep. 



200 Conrad Aiken 

The earth revolves with me, yet makes no motion, 
The stars pale silently in a coral sky. 
In a whistling void I stand before my mirror, 
Unconcerned, and tie my tie. 

There are horses neighing on far-off hills 
Tossing their long white manes, 
And mountains flash in the rose-white dusk, 
Their shoulders black with rains. . . . 
It is morning, I stand by the mirror 
And surprise my soul once more ; 
The blue air rushes above my ceiling, 
There are suns beneath my floor. . . . 

... It is morning, Senlin says, I ascend from darkness 

And depart on the winds of space for I know not where ; 

My watch is wound, a key is in my pocket, 

And the sky is darkened as I descend the stair. 

There are shadows across the windows, clouds in heaven, 

And a god among the stars; and I will go 

Thinking of him as I might think of daybreak 

And humming a tune I know. . . . 

Vine-leaves tap at the window, 
Dew-drops sing to the garden stones, 
The robin chirps in the chinaberry tree 
Repeating three clear tones. 



Maxwell Bodenheim 

Maxwell Bodenheim was born at Natchez, Mississippi, May 
26, 1892. His education, with the exception of grammar school 
training, was achieved under the guidance of the U. S. Army, in 
which Bodenheim served a full enlistment of three years, be- 
ginning in 1910. In 1918, his first volume appeared and even 



Maxwell Bodenheim 201 

those who were puzzled or repelled by Bodenheim's complex 
idiom were forced to recognize its intense individuality. 

Minna and Myself (1918) and Advice (1920) reveal, first 
of all, this poet's extreme sensitivity to words. Words, under 
his hands, have unexpected growths; placid nouns and sober 
adjectives bear fantastic fruit. Sometimes he packs his meta- 
phors so close that they become inextricably mixed. Sometimes 
he spins his fantasies so thin that the cord of coherence snaps 
and the poem frays into unpatterned ravellings. But, at his 
best, in the realm of the whimsical-grotesque, Bodenheim walks 
with a light and nimble footstep. 



POET TO HIS LOVE 

An old silver church in a forest 

Is my love for you. 

The trees around it 

Are words that I have stolen from your heart. 

An old silver bell, the last smile you gave, 

Hangs at the top of my church. 

It rings only when you come through the forest 

And stand beside it. 

And then, it has no need for ringing, 

For your voice takes its place. 



OLD AGE 

In me is a little painted square 

Bordered by old shops with gaudy awnings. 

And before the shops sit smoking, open-bloused old men, 

Drinking sunlight. 

The old men are my thoughts; 

And I come to them each evening, in a creaking cart, 

And quietly unload supplies. 

We fill slim pipes and chat 



202 Maxwell Bodenheim 

And inhale scents from pale flowers in the center of the 
square. . . . 

Strong men, tinkling women, and squealing children 

Stroll past us, or into the shops. 

They greet the shopkeepers and touch their hats or fore- 
heads to me. . . . 

Some evening I shall not return to my people. 



Edna St. Vincent Mil lay 

Edn»a St. Vincent Millay, possibly the most gifted of the 
younger lyricists, was born February 22, 1892, at Rockland, 
Maine. After a childhood spent almost entirely in New 
England, she attended Vassar College, from which she was 
graduated in 191 7. Since that time she has lived in New York 
City and abroad. 

Although the bulk of her poetry is not large, the quality of 
it approaches and sometimes attains greatness. Her first long 
poem, "Renascence," was written when Miss Millay was scarcely 
nineteen; it remains today one of the most remarkable poems 
of this generation. Beginning like a child's aimless verse, it 
proceeds, with a calm lucidity, to an amazing climax. It is as 
if a child had, in the midst of its ingenuousness, uttered some 
terrific truth. The cumulative power of this poem is surpassed 
only by its beauty. 

Renascence, Miss Millay's first volume, was published in 
1917. It is full of the same passion as its title poem; here is 
a hunger for beauty so intense that no delight is great enough 
to give the soul peace. Such poems as "God's World" and the 
unnamed sonnets vibrate with this rapture. 

Figs from Thistles (1920) is a far more sophisticated booklet. 
Sharp and cynically brilliant, Miss Millay's craftsmanship no 
less than her intuition saves these poems from mere cleverness. 

Second April (1921) is an intensification of her lyrical gift 
tinctured with an increasing sadness. Her poignant poetic 
play, Aria da Capo, first performed by the Provincetown Players 
in New York, was published in The Monthly Chapbook (Eng- 
land) ; the issue of July, 1920, being devoted to it. 



Edna St. Vincent Millay 203 

GOD'S WORLD 

O world, I cannot hold thee close enough ! 

Thy winds, thy wide grey skies! 

Thy mists that roll and rise! 
Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag 
And all but cry with colour ! That gaunt crag 
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff! 
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough ! 

Long have I known a glory in it all, 

But never knew I this ; 

Here such a passion is 
As stretcheth me apart. Lord, I do fear 
Thou'st made the world too beautiful this year. 
My soul is all but out of me, — let fall 
No burning leaf ; prithee, let no bird call. 



RENASCENCE 

All I could see from where I stood 
Was three long mountains and a wood ; 
I turned and looked another way, 
And saw three islands in a bay. 
So with my eyes I traced the line 
Of the horizon, thin and fine, 
Straight around till I was come 
Back to where I'd started from; 
And all I saw from where I stood 
Was three long mountains and a wood. 
Over these things I could not see ; 
These were the things that bounded me; 



204 Edna St. Vincent Millay 

And I could touch them with my hand, 
Almost, I thought, from where I stand. 
And all at once things seemed so small 
My breath came short, and scarce at all. 
But, sure, the sky is big, I said ; 
Miles and miles above my head; 
So here upon my back I'll lie 
And look my fill into the sky. 
And so I looked, and, after all, 
The sky was not so very tall. 
The sky, I said, must somewhere stop, 
And — sure enough! — I see the top! 
The sky, I thought, is not so grand; 
I 'most could touch it with my hand ! 
And, reaching up my hand to try, 
I screamed to feel it touch the sky. 

I screamed, and — lo! — Infinity 

Came down and settled over me; 

And, pressing of the Undefined 

The definition on my mind, 

Held up before my eyes a glass 

Through which my shrinking sight did pass 

Until it seemed I must behold 

Immensity made manifold; 

Whispered to me a word whose sound 

Deafened the air for worlds around, 

And brought unmufHed to my ears 

The gossiping of friendly spheres, 

The creaking of the tented sky, 

The ticking of Eternity. 

I saw and heard, and knew at last 
The How and Why of all things, past, 



Edna St. Vincent Millay 205 

And present, and forevermore. 

The universe, cleft to the core, 

Lay open to my probing sense 

That, sick'ning, I would fain pluck thence 

But could not, — nay! But needs must suck 

At the great wound, and could not pluck 

My lips away till I had drawn 

All venom out. — Ah, fearful pawn ! 

For my omniscience I paid toll 

In infinite remorse of soul. 

All sin was of my sinning, all 

Atoning mine, and mine the gall 

Of all regret. Mine was the weight 

Of every brooded wrong, the hate 

That stood behind each envious thrust, 

Mine every greed, mine every lust. 

And all the while for every grief, 

Each suffering, I craved relief 

With individual desire, — 

Craved all in vain ! And felt fierce fire 

About a thousand people crawl; 

Perished with each, — then mourned for all! 

A man was starving in Capri; 

He moved his eyes and looked at me ; 

I felt his gaze, I heard his moan, 

And knew his hunger as my own. 

I saw at sea a great fog-bank 

Between two ships that struck and sank; 

A thousand screams the heavens smote ; 

And every scream tore through my throat; 

No hurt I did not feel, no death 

That was not mine ; mine each last breath 

That, crying, met an answering cry 

From the compassion that was I. 



206 Edna St. Vincent Millay 

All suffering mine, and mine its rod; 
Mine, pity like the pity of God. 
Ah, awful weight! Infinity 
Pressed down upon the finite Me! 
My anguished spirit, like a bird, 
Beating against my lips I heard; 
Yet lay the weight so close about 
There was no room for it without. 
And so beneath the weight lay I 
And suffered death, but could not die. 

Deep in the earth I rested now; 
Cool is its hand upon the brow 
And soft its breast beneath the head 
Of one who is so gladly dead. 
And all at once, and over all, 
The pitying rain began to fall. 
I lay and heard each pattering hoof 
Upon my lowly, thatched roof, 
And seemed to love the sound far more 
Than ever I had done before. 
For rain it hath a friendly sound 
To one who's six feet underground ; 
And scarce the friendly voice or face: 
A grave is such a quiet place. 

The rain, I said, is kind to come 

And speak to me in my new home. 

I would I were alive again 

To kiss the fingers of the rain, 

To drink into my eyes the shine 

Of every slanting silver line, 

To catch the freshened, fragrant breeze 

From drenched and dripping apple-trees. 



Edna St. Vincent Mil lay 207 

For soon the shower will be done, 
And then the broad face of the sun 
Will laugh above the rain-soaked earth 
Until the world with answering mirth 
Shakes joyously, and each round drop 
Rolls, twinkling, from its grass-blade top. 
How can I bear it; buried here, 
While overhead the sky grows clear 
And blue again after the storm? 
O, multi-colored, multiform, 
Beloved beauty over me, 
That I shall never, never see 
Again ! Spring-silver, autumn-gold, 
That I shalLnever more behold h 
Sleeping your myriad magics through, 
Close-sepulchred away from you! 

God, I cried, give me new birth, 
And put me back upon the earth! 
Upset each cloud's gigantic gourd 
And let the heavy rain, down-poured 
In one big torrent, set me free, 
Washing my grave away from me! 

1 ceased ; and, through the breathless hush 
That answered me, the far-off rush 

Of herald wings came whispering 
Like music down the vibrant string 
Of my ascending prayer, and — crash! 
Before the wild wind's whistling lash 
The startled storm-clouds reared on high 
And plunged in terror down the sky, 
And the big rain in one black wave 
Fell from the sky and struck my grave. 
I know not how such things can be 



208 Edna St. Vincent Millay 

I only know there came to me 
A fragrance such as never clings 
To aught save happy living things; 
A sound as of some joyous elf 
Singing sweet songs to please himself, 
And, through and over everything, 
A sense of glad awakening. 
The grass, a tip-toe at my ear, 
Whispering to me I could hear; 
I felt the rain's cool finger-tips 
Brushed tenderly across my lips, 
Laid gently on my sealed sight, 
And all at once the heavy night 
Fell from my eyes and I could see, — 
A drenched and dripping apple-tree, 
A last long line of silver rain, 
A sky grown clear and blue again. 
And as I looked a quickening gust 
Of wind blew up to me and thrust 
Into my face a miracle 
Of orchard-breath, and with the smell, — 
I know not how such things can be!— 
I breathed my soul back into me. 
Ah! Up then from the ground sprang I 
And hailed the earth with such a cry 
As is not heard save from a man 
Who has been dead and lives ag;.in. 
About the trees my arms I wound ; 
Like one gone mad I hugged the ground; 
I raised my quivering arms on high ; 
I laughed and laughed into the sky, 
Till at my throat a strangling sob 
Caught fiercely, and a great heart-throb 



Edna St. Vincent Mil lay 209 

Sent instant tears into my eyes; 

God, I cried, no dark disguise 
Can e'er hereafter hide from me 
Thy radiant identity! 

Thou canst not move across the grass 
But my quick eyes will see Thee pass, 
Nor speak, however silently, 
But my hushed voice will answer Thee. 

1 know the path that tells Thy way 
Through the cool eve of every day; 
God, I can push the grass apart 
And lay my finger on Thy heart! 

The world stands out on either side 
No wider than the heart is wide; 
Above the world is stretched the sky, — 
No higher than the soul is high. 
The heart can push the sea and land 
Farther away on either hand ; 
The soul can split the sky in two, 
And let the face of God shine through. 
But East and West will pinch the heart 
That cannot keep them pushed apart ; 
And he whose soul is flat — the sky 
Will cave in on him by and by. 



THE PEAR TREE 

In this squalid, dirty dooryard, 

Where the chickens scratch and run, 

White, incredible, the pear tree 
Stands apart and takes the sun, 



210 Edna St. Vincent Millay 

Mindful of the eyes upon it, 
Vain of its new holiness, 

Like the waste-man's little daughter 
In her first communion dress. 



Stephen Vincent Benet 

Stephen Vincent Benet, the younger brother of William Rose 
Benet, was born at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in July, 1898. 
He was educated in various parts of the country, graduating 
from Yale in 1919. 

At seventeen he published a small book containing six 
dramatic portraits, Five Men and Pompey (1915), a remarkable 
set of monologues which, in spite of distinct traces of Browning, 
was little short of astounding, coming from a schoolboy. In 
Benet's next volume, Young Adventure (1918), one hears some- 
thing more than the speech of an infant prodigy; the precocious 
facility has developed into an individual vigor. 

Heavens and Earth (1920), the most representative collec- 
tion, has a greater imaginative sweep. His novel, The Be- 
ginning of Wisdom, appeared in 1921. Like his brother, the 
younger Benet is at his best in the decoratively grotesque; his 
fancy exults in running the scales between the whimsically 
bizarre and the lightly diabolic. 



PORTRAIT OF A BOY 

After the whipping, he crawled into bed; 
Accepting the harsh fact with no great weeping. 
How funny uncle's hat had looked striped red! 
He chuckled silently. The moon came, sweeping 
A black frayed rag of tattered cloud before 
In scorning; very pure and pale she seemed, 
Flooding his bed with radiance. On the floor 
Fat motes danced. He sobbed; closed his eyes and 
dreamed. 



Stephen Vincent Benet 211 

Warm sand flowed round him. Blurts of crimson light 
Splashed the white grains like blood. Past the cave's 

mouth 
Shone with a large fierce splendor, wildly bright, 
The crooked constellations of the South; 
Here the Cross swung; and there, affronting Mars, 
The Centaur stormed aside a froth of stars. 
Within, great casks like wattled aldermen 
Sighed of enormous feasts, and cloth of gold 
Glowed on the walls like hot desire. Again, 
Beside webbed purples from some galleon's hold, 
A black chest bore the skull and bones in white 
Above a scrawled "Gunpowder!" By the flames, 
Decked out in crimson, gemmed with syenite, 
Hailing their fellows by outrageous names 
The pirates sat and diced. Their eyes were moons. 
"Doubloons!" they said. The words crashed gold. 

"Doubloons!" 

Leonie Adams 

Leonie Adams was born in Brooklyn, New York, December 
9, 1899. After a public school preparation, she became a 
member of the class of 1922 at Barnard, writing her first 
published poems as an undergraduate. 

The few poems by Miss Adams which have appeared show 
an unusual distinction of thought. They establish a kinship 
with Emily Dickinson by their intellectual restraint, with Edna 
St. Vincent Millay by their spiritual fervor. 

APRIL MORTALITY 

Rebellion shook an ancient dust, 

And bones bleached dry of rottenness 

Said: Heart, be bitter still, nor trust 
The earth, the sky, in their bright dress. 



212 Leonie Adams 

Heart, heart, dost thou not break to kno 
This anguish thou wilt bear alone? 

We sang of it an age ago, 

And traced it dimly upon stone. 

With all the drifting race of men . 

Thou also art begot to mourn 
That she is crucified again, 

The lonely Beauty yet unborn. 

And if thou dreamest to have won 
Some touch of her in permanence, 

'Tis the old cheating of the sun, 
The intricate lovely play of sense. 

Be bitter still, remember how 
Four petals, when a little breath 

Of wind made stir the pear-tree bough, 
Blew delicately down to death. 



HOME-COMING 

When I stepped homeward to my hill 
Dusk went before with quiet tread; 

The bare laced branches of the trees 
Were as a mist about its head. 

Upon its leaf-brown breast, the rocks 
Like great gray sheep lay silent-wise; 

Between the birch trees' gleaming arms, 
The faint stars trembled in the skies. 

The white brook met me half-way up 
And laughed as one that knew me well, 

To whose more clear than crystal voice 
The frost had joined a crystal spell. 



Leonie Adams 213 

The skies lay like pale-watered deep. 

Dusk ran before me to its strand 
And cloudily leaned forth to touch 

The moon's slow wonder with her hand. 



Hilda Conkling 

Hilda Conkling, most gifted of recent infant prodigies, was 
born at Catskill-on-Hudson, New York, October 8, 1910. The 
daughter of Grace Hazard Conkling (see page 124), she came 
to Northampton, Massachusetts, with her mother when she was 
three years old and has lived there ever since. 

Hilda began to write poems — or rather, to talk them — at the 
age of four. Since that time, she has created one hundred and 
fifty little verses, many of them astonishing in exactness of 
phrase and beauty of vision. 

Poems by a Little Girl (1920), published when Hilda was a 
little more than nine years old, is a detailed proof of this 
unaffected originality; "Water," "Hay-Cock," and a dozen others 
are startling in their precision and a power of painting the 
familiar in unsuspected colors. She hears a chickadee talking 
The way smooth bright pebbles 
Drop into water. 
The rooster's comb is "gay as a parade"; he has "pearl 
trinkets on his feet" and 

The short feathers smooth along his back 
Are the dark color of wet rocks, 
Or the rippled green of ships 
When I look at their sides through water. 
Everything is extraordinarily vivid and fanciful to the keen 
senses of this child. 

WATER 

The world turns softly 
Not to spill its lakes and rivers. 
The water is held in its arms 
And the sky is held in the water. 



214 Hilda Conk ling 

What is water, 
That pours silver, 
And can hold the sky? 



HAY-COCK 

This is another kind of sweetness 
Shaped like a bee-hive : 
This is the hive the bees have left, 
It is from this clover-heap 
They took away the honey 
For the other hive! 



I KEEP WONDERING 

I saw a mountain, 

And he was like Wotan looking at himself in the water. 

I saw a cockatoo, 

And he was like sunset clouds. 

Even leaves and little stones 

Are different to my eyes sometimes. 

I keep wondering through and through my heart 

Where all the beautiful things in the world 

Come from. 

And while I wonder 

They go on being beautiful. 



MODERN BRITISH POETRY 



PREFACE 

THE END OF VICTORIANISM 

The age commonly called Victorian came to an end in 
England about 1885. It was an age distinguished by 
many true idealists and many false ideals. It was, in 
spite of its notable artists, on an entirely different level 
from the epoch which had preceded it. Its poetry was, 
in the main, not universal but parochial; its romanticism 
was gilt and tinsel ; its realism was as cheap as its showy 
glass pendants, red plush, parlor chromos and antimacas- 
sars. The period was full of a pessimistic resignation 
(the note popularized by Fitzgerald's Omar Khayyam) 
and a kind of negation which, refusing to see any glamour 
in the actual world, turned to the Middle Ages, to King 
Arthur, to the legend of Troy — to the suave surround- 
ings of a dream-world instead of the hard contours of 
actual experience. 

The poets of a generation before this time were fired 
with such ideas as freedom, a deep and burning awe of 
nature, an insatiable hunger for truth in all its forms 
and manifestations. The characteristic but by no means 
the best poets of the Victorian Era, says Max Plowman, 
"wrote under the dominance of churchliness, of 'sweetness 
and light/ and a thousand lesser theories that have not 
Truth but comfort for their end." 

The revolt against this and the tawdriness of the period 
had already begun ; the best of Victorianism can be found 
not in men who were typically Victorian, but in pioneers 
like Browning and writers like Swinburne, Rossetti, 

217 



21 8 Preface 

William Morris, who were completely out of sympathy 
with their time. 

It was Oscar Wilde who led the men of the now 
famous 'nineties toward an aesthetic freedom, to champion 
a beauty whose existence was its "own excuse for being." 
Wilde's was, in the most outspoken manner, the first use 
of aestheticism as a slogan ; the battle-cry of the group was 
actually the now outworn but then revolutionary "Art 
for Art's sake" ! And, so sick were people of the 
shoddy ornaments and drab ugliness of the immediate 
past, that the slogan won. At least, temporarily. 

THE RISE AND DECLINE OF THE ESTHETIC PHILOSOPHY 

The Yellow Book, the organ of a group of young 
writers and artists, appeared (1894-97), representing a 
reasoned and intellectual reaction, mainly suggested and 
influenced by the French. The group of contributors was 
a peculiarly mixed one with only one thing in common. 
And that was a conscious effort to repudiate the sugary 
airs and prim romantics of the Victorian Era. 

Almost the first act of the "new" men was to rouse 
and outrage their immediate predecessors. This end-of- 
the-century desire to shock, which was so strong and 
natural an impulse, still has a place of its own — especially 
as an antidote, a harsh corrective. Mid- Victorian pro- 
priety and self-satisfaction crumbled under the swift and 
energetic audacities of the sensational young authors 
and artists. The old walls fell; the public, once so apa- 
thetic to belles lettres, was more than attentive to every 
phase of literary experimentation. The last decade of 
the nineteenth century was so tolerant of novelty in art 
and ideas, that it would seem, says Holbrook Jackson in 
his penetrative summary, The Eighteen-Nineties, "as 
though the declining century wished to make amends for 



Preface 219 

several decades of artistic monotony. It may indeed be 
something more than a coincidence that placed this decade 
at the close of a century, and fin de siecle may have been 
at once a swan song and a death-bed repentance." 

But later on, the movement (if such it may be called), 
surfeited with its own excesses, fell into the mere poses 
of revolt; it degenerated into a defense not of Art but 
Artificiality. 

It scarcely needed W. S. Gilbert (in Patience) or 
Robert Hichens (in The Green Carnation) to satirize 
its distorted and disillusioned attitudinizing. It strained 
itself to death ; it became its own burlesque of the bizarre, 
an extravaganza of extravagance. 

WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY 

Henley repudiated this languid aestheticism ; he scorned 
a negative art which was out of touch with the world. 
His was a large and sweeping affirmation. He felt that 
mere existence was glorious; life was coarse, difficult, often 
dangerous and dirty, but splendid at the heart. Art, he 
knew, could not be separated from the dreams and hun- 
gers of man ; it could not flourish only on its own essences 
or technical accomplishments. To live, poetry would 
have to share the fears, angers, hopes and struggles of the 
prosaic world. And so Henley came like a swift salt 
breeze blowing through a perfumed and heavily-screened 
studio. He sang loudly (sometimes even too loudly) of 
the joy of living and the courage of the "unconquerable 
soul." He was a powerful influence not only as a poet 
but as a critic and editor. A pioneer and something of a 
prophet, he was one of the first to champion the paintings 
of Whistler and to proclaim the genius of the sculptor 
Rodin. 

If at times Henley's verse is imperialistic, over-muscu- 



220 Preface 

lar and strident, his noisy moments are redeemed not only 
by his delicate lyrics but by his passionate enthusiasm for 
nobility in whatever cause it was joined. 

THE CELTIC REVIVAL AND J. M. SYNGE 

In 1889, William Butler Yeats published his Wander- 
ings of Oisin; in the same year Douglas Hyde, the 
scholar and folk-lorist, brought out his Book of Gaelic 
Stories. 

The revival of Gaelic and the renascence of Irish litera- 
ture may be said to date from the publication of those two 
books. The fundamental idea of both men and their fol- 
lowers was the same. It was to create a literature which 
would express the national consciousness of Ireland 
through a purely national art. This community of fel- 
lowship and aims is to be found in the varied but allied 
work of Willam Butler Yeats, "A. E." (George W. Rus- 
sell), Moira O'Neill, Lionel Johnson, Katharine Tynan, 
Padraic Colum and others. They began to reflect the 
strange background of dreams, politics, suffering and hero- 
ism that is immortally Irish. The first fervor gone, a 
short period of dullness set in. After reanimating the old 
myths, surcharging the legendary heroes with a new sig- 
nificance, it seemed for a while that the movement would 
lose itself in a literary mysticism. But an increasing 
concern with the peasant, the migratory laborer, the 
tramp, followed ; an interest that was something of a re- 
action against the influence of Yeats and his mystic other- 
worldliness. And, in 1904, the Celtic Revival reached its 
height with John Millington Synge, who was not only 
the greatest dramatist of the Irish Theatre, but (to quote 
such contrary critics as George Moore and Harold 
Williams) "one of the greatest dramatists who have 
written in English." Synge's poetry, brusque and all too 



Preface 221 

small in quantity, was a minor occupation with him and 
yet the quality and power of it is unmistakable. Its 
content is never great but the raw vigor in it was to 
serve as a bold banner — a sort of brilliant Jolly Roger 
— for the younger men of the following period. It is 
not only this dramatists brief verses and his intensely 
musical prose but his sharp prefaces that have exercised 
so strong an influence. 

Synge's poetic power is unquestionably greatest in his 
superb plays. In The Well of the Saints, The Playboy 
of the Western World and Riders of the Sea there are 
more poignance, beauty of form and richness of language 
than in any piece of dramatic writing since Elizabethan 
times. 

But although Synge's poetry was not his major con- 
cern, numbering only twenty-four original pieces and 
eighteen translations, it had a surprising effect upon his 
followers. It marked a point of departure, a reaction 
against both the too-polished and over-rhetorical verse of 
his immediate predecessors and the dehumanized mysticism 
of many of his associates. In that memorable preface to 
his Poems he wrote what was a slogan, a manifesto and 
at the same time a classic credo for all that we call the 
"new" poetry. "I have often thought," it begins, "that 
at the side of poetic diction, which everyone condemns, 
modern verse contains a great deal of poetic material, 
using 'poetic* in the same special sense. The poetry of 
exaltation will be always the highest; but when men lose 
their poetic feeling for ordinary life and cannot write 
poetry of ordinary things, their exalted poetry is likely to 
lose its strength of exaltation in the way that men cease 
to build beautiful churches when they have lost happiness 
in building shops. . . . Even if we grant that exalted 
poetry can be kept successfully by itself, the strong things 



222 Preface 

of life are needed in poetry also, to show that what is 
exalted or tender is not made by feeble blood." 



RUDYARD KIPLING 

New tendencies are contagious. But they also disclose 
themselves simultaneously in places and people where 
there has been no point of contact. While Synge was 
publishing his proofs of the keen poetry in everyday life, 
Kipling was illuminating, in a totally different manner, 
the wealth of poetic material in things hitherto regarded 
as too commonplace for poetry. Before literary England 
had quite recovered from its surfeit of Victorian priggish- 
ness and pre-Raphaelite delicacy, Kipling came along with 
high spirits and a great tide of life, sweeping all before 
him. An obscure Anglo-Indian journalist, the publication 
of his Barrack-room Ballads in 1892 brought him sudden 
notice. By 1895 he was internationally famous. Brush- 
ing over the pallid attempts to revive a pallid past, he 
rode triumphantly on a wave of buoyant and sometimes 
brutal joy in the present. Kipling gloried in the material 
world; he did more — he glorified it. He pierced the 
coarse exteriors of seemingly prosaic things — things like 
machinery, bridge-building, cockney soldiers, slang, steam, 
the dirty by-products of science (witness "M'Andrews 
Hymn" and "The Bell Buoy") — and uncovered their 
hidden glamour. "Romance is gone," sighed most of his 
contemporaries, 

". . . and all unseen 
Romance brought up the nine-fifteen." 

That sentence (from his poem "The King") contains 
the key to the manner in which the author of The Five 
Nations helped to rejuvenate English verse. 



Preface 223 

Kipling, with his perception of ordinary people in terms 
of ordinary life, was one of the strongest links between 
the Wordsworth-Browning era and the latest apostles of 
vigor, beginning with Masefield. He has had a score of 
imitators, ranging from the facile Cicely Fox Smith to 
the glibly uninspired Robert W. Service, but none of 
them has captured anything of his quality except his 
characteristic beat and rhythms. There are occasional 
and serious defects in Kipling's work. Frequently he falls 
into a journalistic ease that tends to turn into jingle; he is 
fond of a militaristic drum-banging that is as blatant as 
the insularity he condemns. But a burning if sometimes 
too fatuous faith shines through his achievements. His 
best work reveals an intensity that crystallizes into beauty 
what was originally tawdry, that lifts the vulgar and in- 
cidental to the place of the universal. 

JOHN MASEFIELD 

All art is a twofold revivifying — a recreation of subject 
and a reanimating of form. And poetry becomes perenni- 
ally "new" by returning to the old — with a different 
consciousness, a greater awareness. In 191 1, when art 
was again searching for novelty, John Masefield created 
something startling and new by going back to 1385 and 
The Canterbury Pilgrims! Employing both the Chau- 
cerian model and a form similar to the practically forgot- 
ten Byronic stanza, Masefield wrote, in rapid succession, 
The Everlasting Mercy (1911), The Widow in the Bye 
Street (1912), Dauber (19 12), The Daffodil Fields 
(19 13) — four astonishing rhymed narratives and four 
of the most remarkable poems of our generation. Ex- 
pressive of every rugged phase of life, these poems, unit- 
ing old and new manners, responded to Synge's proclama- 



224 Preface 

tion that "the strong things of life are needed in poetry 
also . . . and it may almost be said that before verse 
can be human again it must be brutal." 

Masefleld brought back to poetry that mixture of 
beauty and brutality which is its most human and en- 
during quality. He brought back that rich and almost 
vulgar vividness which is the very life-blood of Chaucer, 
of Shakespeare, of Burns, of Villon, of Heine — and of 
all those who were not only great artists but great 
humanists. As a purely descriptive poet, he can take his 
place with the masters of sea and landscape. As an imag- 
inative realist, he showed those who were stumbling from 
one wild eccentricity to another to thrill them, that they 
themselves were wilder, stranger, far more thrilling than 
anything in the world — or out of it. Few things in con- 
temporary poetry are as powerful as the regeneration of 
Saul Kane (in The Everlasting Mercy) or the story of 
Dauber, the tale of a tragic sea-voyage and a dreaming 
youth who wanted to be a painter. The vigorous descrip- 
tion of rounding Cape Horn in the latter poem is superbly 
done, a masterpiece in itself. Masefield's later volumes 
are quieter in tone, more measured in technique; there 
is an almost religious ring to many of his Shakespearean 
sonnets. But the swinging surge is there, a passionate 
strength that leaps through all his work from Salt Water 
Ballads (1902) to Reynard the Fox (1919). 

THE WAR AND "THE GEORGIANS" 

There is no sharp statistical line of demarcation be- 
tween Masefleld and the younger men. Although sev- 
eral of them owe much to him, most of the younger poets 
speak in accents of their own. W. W. Gibson had 
already reinforced the "return to actuality" by turning 
from his first preoccupation with shining knights, fault- 



Preface 225 

less queens, ladies in distress and all the paraphernalia of 
hackneyed mediaeval romances, to write about ferrymen, 
berry-pickers, stone-cutters, farmers, printers, circus-men, 
carpenters — dramatizing (though sometimes theatricaliz- 
ing) the primitive emotions of uncultured and ordinary 
people in Livelihood, Daily Bread and Fires. This in- 
tensity had been asking new questions. It found its 
answers in the war; repressed emotionalism discovered a 
new outlet. 

The war caught up the youth of the country in a great 
gust of national fervor. But after the first flush of false 
romanticism passed, the consequent disillusion made itself 
heard. The fierce war-poems of Siegfried Sassoon, Wil- 
fred Owen and Robert Graves are the very opposite of 
the jingo journalistic verse that attempted to paint the 
world's greatest tragedy in bright and cheerful colors. 

But this intensity was not confined to the martial or 
the anti-militarist poets. It manifests itself even in the 
less realistic poems of the romantic Rupert Brooke (who 
owes less to his immediate predecessors than he does to 
the passionately intellectual John Donne), in the dark 
introspections of D. H. Lawrence and the brooding nobil- 
ity of Charlotte Mew. And, though the younger of these 
poets (John Freeman, W. J. Turner and others) are 
echoing traditional English landscape poetry with great 
persistence and little variety, magic has not disappeared 
from the world of the contemporary Englishman. 

Magic lives in the moon-soaked wonder and nursery- 
rhyme whimsicality of Walter de la Mare, in the limpid 
and unperturbed loveliness of Ralph Hodgson, in the naif 
and delicate lyrics of W. H. Davies, in the soil-flavored 
fantasies of James Stephens. Any one of these four sing- 
ers would be an exquisite ornament to his decade. 

All of the poets mentioned in this section (with the 



226 Preface 

exception of Charlotte Mew and Wilfred Owen, whose 
verse was posthumously published) have formed them- 
selves in a loose group called "The Georgians," and an 
anthology of their best work has appeared every two years 
since 1913. Masefield, Lascelles Abercrombie and John 
Drinkwater are also listed among the Georgian poets. 
When their first collection appeared in March, 1913, 
Henry Newbolt, critic as well as poet, wrote: "These 
younger poets have no temptation to be false. They are 
not for making something 'pretty/ something up to the 
standard of professional patterns. . . . They write as 
grown men walk, each with his own unconscious stride 
and gesture. ... In short, they express themselves and 
seem to steer without an effort between the dangers of 
innovation and reminiscence." 

The secret of this success is not an exclusive discovery 
of the modern poets. It is their inheritance, derived from 
those predecessors who, "from Wordsworth and Cole- 
ridge onward, have worked for the assimilation of verse 
to the manner and accent of natural speech." In its 
adaptability no less than in its vigor, modern English 
poetry is true to its period — and its past. 



Austin Dobson 

(Henry) Austin Dobson was born at Plymouth, in 1840, and 
was educated in Wales and on the Continent. In 1856, he re- 
ceived a clerkship in The Board of Trade and remained in 
official life a great part of his life. 

His first collection, Vignettes in Rhyme (1873), attracted 
attention by the ease with which the author managed his 
dexterous and most difficult effects. With Proverbs in Porcelain 
(1877), Old World Idylls (1883) and At the Sign of the Lyre 
(1885), it was evident that a new master of vers de societe had 
arisen. The crispness and clean delicacy of his verse make 
him the peer of Prior, Praed and Thomas Hood. 

During the latter part of his life, he devoted himself to a 
type of semi-biographical essay, intended to preserve the spirit 
of some nearly- or wholly-forgotten celebrity. In this form, his 
prose is scarcely less distinctive than his verse; his detailed 
and charmingly dispensed knowledge of the time of Queen Anne 
gives to his writings its own special flavor of "archaic gentility". 

Although most of his rhymes are charming rather than pro- 
found, certain pages, like "Before Sedan," are memorable for 
their serious clarity. 

Dobson died September 3, 1921. 



IN AFTER DAYS 

In after days when grasses high 
O'ertop the stone where I shall lie, 
Though ill or well the world adjust 
My slender claim to honored dust, 
I shall not question or reply. 

I shall not see the morning sky; 
I shall not hear the night-wind's sigh ; 
I shall be mute, as all men must 
In after days! 
227 



228 Austin Dobson 

But yet, now living, fain were I 
That some one then should testify, 
Saying — "He held his pen in trust 
To Art, not serving shame or lust." 
Will none? — Then let my memory die 
In after days! 



BEFORE SEDAN 

"The dead hand clasped a letter" 

— Special Correspondence. 

Here in this leafy place 

Quiet he lies, 
Cold with his sightless face 

Turned to the skies; 
'Tis but another dead ; 
All you can say is said. 

Carry his body hence, — 

Kings must have slaves; 
Kings climb to eminence 

Over men's graves: 
So this man's eye is dim ; — 
Throw the earth over him. 

What was the white you touched, 

There, at his side? 
Paper his hand had clutched 

Tight ere he died ; — 
Message or wish, may be ; 
Smooth the folds out and see. 



Austin Dobson 229 

Hardly the worst of us 

Here could have smiled ! 
Only the tremulous 

Words of a child; 
Prattle, that has for stops 
Just a few ruddy drops. 

Look. She is sad to miss, 

Morning and night, 
His — her dead father's — kiss; 

Tries to be bright, 
Good to mamma, and sweet. 
That is all. "Marguerite." 

Ah, if beside the dead 

Slumbered the pain ! 
Ah, if the hearts that bled 

Slept with the slain ! 
If the grief died ; — but no. 
Death will not have it so. 



Wilfred Scawen Blunt 

Wilfred Scawen Blunt was born at Crabbet Park, Crawley, 
Sussex, in 1840. He was educated at St. Mary's College, Oscott, 
and was a member of the diplomatic service from 1850 to 1870. 
He spent many years in the East, his observations making him 
strongly sympathetic to lesser nationalities and all the down- 
trodden. He favored the cause of the Egyptians; his voice was 
always lifted for justice to Ireland. 

As a poet, he is best known by his The Love Sonnets of 
Proteus (1881) and The New Pilgrimage (1889). Both 
volumes reveal a deep, philosophical nature expressing itself 
in terms of high seriousness. 

His remarkable My Diaries appeared when Blunt was an 
octogenarian, in 1921. 



230 Wilfred Scawen Blunt 



LAUGHTER AND DEATH 

There is no laughter in the natural world 

Of beast or fish or bird, though no sad doubt 

Of their futurity to them unfurled 

Has dared to check the mirth-compelling shout. 

The lion roars his solemn thunder out 

To the sleeping woods. The eagle screams her cry. 

Even the lark must strain a serious throat 

To hurl his blest defiance at the sky. 

Fear, anger, jealousy, have found a voice. 

Love's pain or rapture the brute bosoms swell. 

Nature has symbols for her nobler joys, 

Her nobler sorrows. Who has dared foretell 

That only man, by some sad mockery, 

Should learn to laugh who learns that he must die ? 



Thomas Hardy 



Thomas Hardy was born in 1840, and has for years been 
famous on both sides of the Atlantic as a writer of intense and 
sombre novels. His Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the 
Obscure are possibly his best known, although his Wessex Tales 
and Life's Little Ironies are no less imposing. 

It was not until he was almost sixty, in 1898 to be precise, 
that Hardy abandoned prose and challenged attention as a 
poet. The Dynasts, a drama of the Napoleonic Wars, is in 
three parts, nineteen acts and one hundred and thirty scenes, 
a massive and most amazing contribution to contemporary art. 

His Collected Poems were published by The Macmillan 
Company in 1919 and reveal another and noble phase of one 
of the greatest living writers of English. 



Thomas Hardy 231 

IN TIME OF "THE BREAKING OF NATIONS" 

Only a man harrowing clods 

In a slow silent walk, 
With an old horse that stumbles and nods 

Half asleep as they stalk. 

Only thin smoke without flame 

From the heaps of couch-grass: 
Yet this will go onward the same 

Though Dynasties pass. 

Yonder a maid and her wight 

Come whispering by; 
War's annals will fade into night 

Ere their story die. 



THE DARKLING THRUSH 

I leaned upon a coppice gate 

When Frost was spectre-gray, 
And Winter's dregs made desolate 

The weakening eye of day. 
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky 

Like strings from broken lyres, 
And all mankind that haunted nigh 

Had sought their household fires. 

The land's sharp features seemed to be 
The Century's corpse outleant; 

His crypt the cloudy canopy, 
The wind his death-lament. 



232 Thomas Hardy 

The ancient pulse of germ and birth 
Was shrunken hard and dry, 

And every spirit upon earth 
Seemed fervourless as I. 



At once a voice burst forth among 

The bleak twigs overhead 
In a full-hearted evensong 

Of joy unlimited; 
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small, 

In blast-beruffled plume, 
Has chosen thus to fling his soul 

Upon the growing gloom. 

So little cause for carollings 

Of such ecstatic sound 
Was written on terrestrial things 

Afar or nigh around, 
That I could think there trembled through 

His happy good-night air 
Some blessed hope, whereof he knew 

And I was unaware. 



Andrew Lang 

Andrew Lang, critic and essayist, was born in 1844 and 
educated at Balliol College, Oxford. Besides his many well- 
known translations of Homer, Theocritus and the Greek An- 
thology, he has published numerous biographical works. 

As a poet, his chief claim rests on his delicate light verse. 
Ballads and Lyrics of Old France (1872), Ballades in Blue 
China (1880), and Rhymes a la Mode (1884) disclose Lang 
as a lesser Austin Dobson. 



Andrew Lang 233 



SCYTHE SONG 

Mowers, weary and brown and blithe, 

What is the word, methinks, ye know, 
Endless over-word that the Scythe 

Sings to the blades of the grass below? 
Scythes that swing in the grass and clover, 

Something, still, they say as they pass; 
What is the word that, over and over, 

Sings the Scythe to the flowers and grass? 



Hush, ah, hush, the Scythes are saying, 

Hush, and heed not, and fall asleep; 
Hush they say to the grasses swaying; 

Hush they sing to the clover deep ! 
Hush — 'tis the lullaby Time is singing — 

Hush and heed not for all things pass ; 
Hush, ah, hush! and the Scythes are swinging 

Over the clover, over the grass! 



Robert Bridges 

Robert (Seymour) Bridges was born in 1844 an d educated 
at Eton and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. After travel- 
ing extensively, he studied medicine in London and practiced 
until 1882. Most of his poems, like his occasional plays, are 
classical in tone as well as treatment. He was appointed 
poet laureate in 1913, following Alfred Austin. His command 
of the secrets of rhythm, especially exemplified in Shorter Poems 
(1894), through a subtle versification give his lines a firm deli- 
cacy and beauty of pattern. 



234 Robert Bridges 



WINTER NIGHTFALL 

The day begins to droop, — 

Its course is done: 
But nothing tells the place 

Of the setting sun. 

The hazy darkness deepens, 

And up the lane 
You may hear, but cannot see, 

The homing wain. 

An engine pants and hums 
In the farm hard by: 

Its lowering smoke is lost 
In the lowering sky. 

The soaking branches drip, 
And all night through 

The dropping will not cease 
In the avenue. 

A tall man there in the house 
Must keep his chair: 

He knows he will never again 
Breathe the spring air: 

His heart is worn with work; 

He is giddy and sick 
If he rise to go as far 

As the nearest rick: 

He thinks of his morn of life, 
His hale, strong years; 

And braves as he may the night 
Of darkness and tears. 



Arthur O'Shaughnessy 23$ 

The Irish-English singer, Arthur William Edgar O'Shaugh- 
nessy, was born in London in 1844. He was connected, for a 
while, with the British Museum, and was transferred later to 
the Department of Natural History. His first literary success, 
Epic of W omen (1870), promised a brilliant future for the 
young poet, a promise strengthened by his Music and Moon- 
light (1874). Always delicate in health, his hopes were 
dashed by periods of illness and an early death in London 
in 1881. 

The poem here reprinted is not only O'Shaughnessy's best 
but is, because of its perfect blending of music and message, 
one of the immortal classics of our verse. 



ODE 

We are the music-makers, 

And we are the dreamers of dreams, 
Wandering by lone sea-breakers, 

And sitting by desolate streams ; 
World-losers and world-forsakers, 

On whom the pale moon gleams: 
Yet we are the movers and shakers 

Of the world for ever, it seems. 



With wonderful deathless ditties 
We build up the world's great cities, 

And out of a fabulous story 

We fashion an empire's glory : 
One man with a dream, at pleasure, 

Shall go forth and conquer a crown ; 
And three with a new song's measure 

Can trample an empire down. 



236 Arthur O'Shaughnessy 

We, in the ages lying 

In the buried past of the earth, 
Built Nineveh with our sighing, 

And Babel itself with our mirth; 
And o'erthrew them with prophesying 

To the old of the new world's worth ; 
For each age is a dream that is dying, 

Or one that is coming to birth. 



Alice Meynell 

Alice (Christina Thompson) Meynell was born in 1848, 
was educated privately by her father and spent a great part 
of her early life in Italy. She married Wilfred Meynell, the 
friend and editor of Francis Thompson. 

Her work, which is high in conception and fine in execu- 
tion, is distinguished by its pensive, religious note. Her first 
four volumes appeared, in a condensed form, in Collected 
Poems (1913). Since then, her most representative work is A 
Father of Women and Other Poems (1917). 



THE SHEPHERDESS 

She walks — the lady of my delight — 

A shepherdess of sheep. 
Her flocks are thoughts. She keeps them white; 

She guards them from the steep; 
She feeds them on the fragrant height, 

And folds them in for sleep. 

She roams maternal hills and bright 

Dark valleys safe and deep. 
Into that tender breast at night, 

The chastest stars may peep. 
She walks — the lady of my delight — 

A shepherdess of sheep. 



Alice Meynell 237 

She holds her little thoughts in sight, 

Though gay they run and leap. 
She is so circumspect and right; 

She has her soul to keep. 
She walks — the lady of my delight — 

A shepherdess of sheep. 



William Ernest Henley 

William Ernest Henley was born in 1849 and was educated 
at the Grammar School of Gloucester. From childhood he was 
afflicted with a tuberculous disease which finally necessitated 
the amputation of a foot. His Hospital Verses, those vivid 
precursors of current free verse, were a record of the time 
when he was at the infirmary at Edinburgh; they are sharp 
with the sights, sensations, even the actual smells of the sick- 
room. In spite (or, more probably, because) of his continued 
poor health, Henley never ceased to worship strength and 
energy; courage and a triumphant belief in a harsh world 
shine out of the athletic London Voluntaries (1892) and the 
lightest and most musical lyrics in Hawthorn and Lavender 
(1898). 

After a brilliant and varied career (see Preface), devoted 
mostly to journalism, Henley died in 1903. 



INVICTUS 

Out of the night that covers me, 
Black as the Pit from pole to pole, 

I thank whatever gods may be 
For my unconquerable soul. 

In the fell clutch of circumstance 
I have not winced nor cried aloud. 

Under the bludgeonings of chance 
My head is bloody, but unbowed. 



238 William Ernest Henley 

Beyond this place of wrath and tears 
Looms but the Horror of the shade, 

And yet the menace of the years 
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid. 



It matters not how strait the gate, 

How charged with punishments the scroll, 

I am the master of my fate: 
I am the captain of my soul. 



THE BLACKBIRD 

The nightingale has a lyre of gold, 

The lark's is a clarion call, 
And the blackbird plays but a boxwood flute, 

But I love him best of all. 

For his song is all of the joy of life, 
And we in the mad, spring weather, 

We two have listened till he sang 
Our hearts and lips together. 



MARGARITA SORORI 

A late lark twitters from the quiet skies; 

And from the west, 

Where the sun, his day's work ended, 

Lingers as in content, 

There falls on the old, grey city 

An influence luminous and serene, 

A shining peace. 



William Ernest Henley 239 

The smoke ascends 

In a rosy-and-golden haze. The spires 

Shine, and are changed. In the valley 

Shadows rise. The lark sings on. The sun, 

Closing his benediction, 

Sinks, and the darkening air 

Thrills with a sense of the triumphing night — 

Night with her train of stars 

And her great gift of sleep. 

So be my passing! 

My task accomplished and the long day done, 

My wages taken, and in my heart 

Some late lark singing, 

Let me be gathered to the quiet w T est, 

The sundown splendid and serene, 

Death. 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

Robert Louis Stevenson was born at Edinburgh in 1850. He 
was at first trained to be a lighthouse engineer, following the 
profession of his family. However, he studied law instead, 
was admitted to the bar in 1875, and abandoned law for 
literature a few years later. 

Though primarily a novelist, Stevenson has left one im- 
mortal book of poetry which is equally at home in the nursery 
and the library: A Child's Garden of Verses (first published 
in 1885) is second only to Mother Goose's own collection in 
its lyrical simplicity and universal appeal. Underwoods 
(1887) and Ballads (1890) comprise his entire poetic output. 
As a genial essayist, he is not unworthy to be ranked with 
Charles Lamb. As a romancer, his fame rests securely on 
Kidnapped, the unfinished masterpiece, Weir of Hermiston, and 
that eternal classic of youth, Treasure Island. 

Stevenson died after a long and dogged fight with his ill- 
ness, in the Samoan Islands in 1894. 



240 Robert Louis Stevenson 

ROMANCE 

I will make you brooches and toys for your delight 
Of bird-song at morning and star-shine at night. 
I will make a palace fit for you and me, 
Of green days in forests and blue days at sea. 

I will make my kitchen, and you shall keep your room, 
Where white flows the river and bright blows the broom, 
And you shall wash your linen and keep your body white 
In rainfall at morning and dewfall at night. 

And this shall be for music when no one else is near, 
The fine song for singing, the rare song to hear! 
That only I remember, that only you admire, 
Of the broad road that stretches and the roadside fire. 

REQUIEM 

Under the wide and starry sky 

Dig the grave and let me lie : 
Glad did I live and gladly die, 

And I laid me down with a will. 

This be the verse you 'grave for me : 
Here he lies where he long'd to be; 

Home is the sailor, home from the sea, 
And the hunter home from the hill. 



Fiona Macleod 

(William Sharp) 

William Sharp was born at Garthland Place, Scotland, in 
1855. He wrote several volumes of biography and criticism, 
published a book of plays greatly influenced by Maeterlinck 
(Vistas) and was editor of "The Canterbury Poets'' series. 



Fiona Macleod 241 

His feminine alter ego, Fiona Macleod, was a far different 
personality. Sharp actually believed himself possessed of an- 
other spirit; under the spell of this other self, he wrote sev- 
eral volumes of Celtic tales, beautiful tragic romances and 
no little unusual poetry. Of the prose stories written by Fiona 
Macleod, the most barbaric and vivid are those collected in 
The Sin-Eater and Other Tales; the longer Pharais, A Ro- 
mance of the Isles, is scarcely less unique. 

In ten years, 1882-1891, William Sharp published four 
volumes of rather undistinguished verse. In 1896 From the 
Hills of Dream appeared over the signature of Fiona Macleod; 
The Hour of Beauty, a rather more distinctive collection, fol- 
lowed shortly. Both poetry and prose were always the result 
of two sharply differentiated moods constantly fluctuating; 
the emotional mood was that of Fiona Macleod, the intellec- 
tual and, it must be admitted, the more arresting mood was that 
of William Sharp. 

He died in 1905. 

THE VALLEY OF SILENCE 

In the secret Valley of Silence 

No breath doth fall; 
No wind stirs in the branches; 
No bird doth call: 
As on a white wall 

A breathless lizard is still, 
So silence lies on the valley 
Breathlessly still. 

In the dusk-grown heart of the valley 

An altar rises white: 
No rapt priest bends in awe 
Before its silent light: 
But sometimes a flight 

Of breathless words of prayer 
White-wing'd enclose the altar, 
Eddies of prayer. 



!\1 Oscar Wilde 

Oscar Wilde was born at Dublin, Ireland, in 1856, and even 
as an undergraduate at Oxford he was marked for a brilliant 
career. When he was a trifle over 21 years of age, he won 
the Newdigate Prize with his poem Ravenna. 

Giving himself almost entirely to prose, he speedily became 
known as a writer of brilliant epigrammatic essays and even 
more brilliant paradoxical plays such as An Ideal Husband 
and The Importance of Being Earnest. His aphorisms and 
flippancies were quoted everywhere; his fame as a wit was 
only surpassed by his notoriety as an aesthete. (See Preface.) 

Most of his poems in prose (such as The Happy Prince, The 
Birthday of the Infanta and The Fisherman and His Soul) 
are more imaginative and richly colored than his verse; but 
in one long poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), he 
sounded his deepest, simplest and most enduring note. Prison 
was, in many ways, a regeneration for Wilde. It not only 
produced The Ballad of Reading Gaol but made possible his 
most poignant piece of writing, De Profundis, only a small 
part of which has been published. 

Wilde's society plays, flashing and cynical, were the fore- 
runners of Bernard Shaw's audacious and far more searching 
ironies. 

Wilde died at Paris, November 30, 1900. 



REQUIESCAT 

Tread lightly, she is near 

Under the snow, 
Speak gently, she can hear 

The daisies grow. 

All her bright golden hair 
Tarnished with rust, 

She that was young and fair 
Fallen to dust. 



Oscar Wilde 243 

Lily-like, white as snow, 

She hardly knew 
She was a woman, so 

Sweetly she grew. 

Coffin-board, heavy stone, 

Lie on her breast; 
I vex my heart alone, 

She is at rest. 

Peace, peace; she cannot hear 

Lyre or sonnet; 
All my life's buried here, 

Heap earth upon it. 



John Davidson 

John Davidson was born at Barrhead, Renfrewshire, in 
1857. His Ballads and Songs (1895) and New Ballads (1897) 
attained a sudden but too short-lived popularity, and his 
great promise was quenched by an apathetic public and by his 
own growing disillusion and despair. His sombre yet direct 
poetry never tired of repeating his favorite theme: "Man is 
but the Universe grown conscious." 

Davidson died by his own hand at Penzance in 1909. 



IMAGINATION 

(From "New Years Eve JJ ) 

There is a dish to hold the sea, 
A brazier to contain the sun, 

A compass for the galaxy, 

A voice to wake the dead and done ! 



244 John Davidson 

That minister of ministers, 

Imagination, gathers up 
The undiscovered Universe, 

Like jewels in a jasper cup. 

Its flame can mingle north and south; 

Its accent with the thunder strive ; 
The ruddy sentence of its mouth 

Can make the ancient dead alive. 

The mart of power, the fount of will, 
The form and mould of every star, 

The source and bound of good and ill, 
The key of all the things that are, 

Imagination, new and strange 
In every age, can turn the year; 

Can shift the poles and lightly change 
The mood of men, the world's career. 



William Watson 

William Watson was born at Burley-in-Wharfedale, York- 
shire, August 2, 1858. He achieved his first wide success 
through his long and eloquent poems on Wordsworth, Shelley, 
and Tennyson — poems that attempted, and sometimes suc- 
cessfully, to combine the manners of these masters. The Hope 
of the World (1897) contains some of his most characteristic 
verse. 

It was understood that he would be appointed poet laureate 
upon the death of Alfred Austin. But some of his "radical" 
and semi-political poems are supposed to have displeased the 
powers at Court, and the honor went to Robert Bridges. His 
best work, which has both dignity and imagination, may be 
found in Selected Poems, published in 1903 by John Lane Co. 



William Watson 24.C 

SONG * 

April, April, 

Laugh thy girlish laughter; 
Then, the moment after, 
Weep thy girlish tears, 
April, that mine ears 
Like a lover greetest, 
If I tell thee, sweetest, 
All my hopes and fears. 
April, April, 

Laugh thy golden laughter, 
But, the moment after, 
Weep thy golden tears! 

ESTRANGEMENT ' 

So, without, breach, we fall apart, 

Tacitly sunder — neither you nor I 

Conscious of one intelligible Why, 

And both, from severance, winning equal smart. 

So, with resigned and acquiescent heart, 

Whene'er your name on some chance lip may lie, 

I seem to see an alien shade pass by, 

A spirit wherein I have no lot or part. 

Thus may a captive, in some fortress grim, 

From casual speech betwixt his warders, learn 

That June on her triumphal progress goes 

Through arched and bannered woodlands; while for him 

She is a legend emptied of concern, 

And idle is the rumour of the rose. 

1 From The Hope of the World by William Watson. Copy- 
right, 1897, by John Lane Company. Reprinted by permission 
of the publishers. 



246 Francis Thompson 

Born in 1859 at Preston, Francis (Joseph) Thompson was 
educated at Owen's College, Manchester. Later he tried all 
manner of strange ways of earning a living. He was, at 
various times, assistant in a boot-shop, medical student, col- 
lector for a book seller and homeless vagabond; there was 
a period in his life when he sold matches on the streets of 
London. He was discovered in terrible poverty by the editor 
of a magazine to which he had sent some verses the year before. 
Almost immediately thereafter he became famous. His ex- 
alted mysticism is seen at its purest in "A Fallen Yew" and 
"The Hound of Heaven." Coventry Patmore, the distin- 
guished poet of an earlier period, says of the latter poem, 
which is unfortunately too long to quote, "It is one of the 
very few great odes of which our language can boast." 

Thompson died, after a fragile and spasmodic life, in St. 
John's Wood in November, 1907. 



DAISY 

Where the thistle lifts a purple crown 

Six foot out of the turf, 
And the harebell shakes on the windy hill- 

O breath of the distant surf! — 



The hills look over on the South, 
And southward dreams the sea; 

And with the sea-breeze hand in hand 
Came innocence and she. 



Where 'mid the gorse the raspberry 
Red for the gatherer springs; 

Two children did we stray and talk 
Wise, idle, childish things. 



Francis Thompson 247 

She listened with big-lipped surprise, 

Breast-deep 'mid flower and spine: 

Her skin was like a grape whose veins 
Run snow instead of wine. 

She knew not those sweet words she spake, 

Nor knew her own sweet way; 
But there's never a bird, so sweet a song 

Thronged in whose throat all day. 

Oh, there were flowers in Storrington 

On the turf and on the spray; 
But the sweetest flower on Sussex hills 

Was the Daisy-flower that day! 

Her beauty smoothed earth's furrowed face. 

She gave me tokens three: — 
A look, a word of her winsome mouth, 

And a wild raspberry. 

A berry red, a guileless look, 

A still word, — strings of sand ! 
And yet they made my wild, wild heart 

Fly down to her little hand. 

For standing artless as the air, 

And candid as the skies, 
She took the berries with her hand, 

And the love with her sweet eyes. 

The fairest things have fleetest end, 

Their scent survives their close: 
But the rose's scent is bitterness' 

To him that loved the rose. 



248 Francis Thompson 

She looked a little wistfully, 

Then went her sunshine way: — 

The sea's eye had a mist on it, 

And the leaves fell from the day. 

She went her unremembering way, 
She went and left in me 

The pang of all the partings gone, 
And partings yet to be. 

She left me marvelling why my soul 
Was sad that she was glad ; 

At all the sadness in the sweet, 
The sweetness in the sad. 

Still, still I seemed to see her, still 
Look up with soft replies, 

And take the berries with her hand, 
And the love with her lovely eyes. 

Nothing begins, and nothing ends, 
That is not paid with moan, 

For we are born in other's pain, 
And perish in our own. 

TO A SNOWFLAKE 

What heart could have thought you?- 

Past our devisal 

(O filigree petal!) 

Fashioned so purely, 

Fragilely, surely, 

From what Paradisal 

Imagineless metal, 

Too costly for cost? 

Who hammered you, wrought you, 



Francis Thompson 249 

From argentine vapour ? — 

"God was my shaper. 

Passing surmisal, 

He hammered, He wrought me, 

From curled silver vapour, 

To lust of his mind : — 

Thou couldst not have thought me! 

So purely, so palely, 

Tinily, surely, 

Mightily, frailly, 

Insculped and embossed, 

With His hammer of wind, 

And His graver of frost." 

A. E. Housman 

A. E. Housman was born March 26, 1859, ana \ after a clas- 
sical education, he was, for ten years, a Higher Division 
Clerk in H. M. Patent Office. Later in life, he became a 
teacher. 

Housman has published only one volume of original verse, 
but that volume, A Shropshire Lad (1896), is known wherever 
modern English poetry is read. Underneath his ironies, there 
is a rustic humor that has many subtle variations. From a 
melodic standpoint, A Shropshire Lad is a collection of ex- 
quisite, haunting and almost perfect songs. 

Housman has been a professor of Latin since 1892 and, 
besides his immortal set of lyrics, has edited Juvenal and 
the books of Manilius. 



REVEILLE 

Wake: the silver dusk returning 
Up the beach of darkness brims, 

And the ship of sunrise burning 
Strands upon the eastern rims. 



250 A. E. Housman 

Wake: the vaulted shadow shatters, 
Trampled to the floor it spanned, 

And the tent of night in tatters 
Straws the sky-pavilioned land. 

Up, lad, up, 'tis late for lying: 
Hear the drums of morning play; 

Hark, the empty highways crying 
"Who'll beyond the hills away?" 

Towns and countries woo together, 
Forelands beacon, belfries call; 

Never lad that trod on leather 
Lived to feast his heart with all. 

Up, lad : thews that lie and cumber 
Sunlit pallets never thrive; 

Morns abed and daylight slumber 
Were not meant for man alive. 

Clay lies still, but blood's a rover; 

Breath's a ware that will not keep. 
Up, lad: when the journey's over 

There'll be time enough to sleep. 



WHEN I WAS ONE-AND-TWENTY 

When I was one-and-twenty 

I heard a wise man say, 
"Give crowns and pounds and guineas 

But not your heart away; 
Give pearls away and rubies 

But keep your fancy free." 
But I was one-and-twenty, 

No use to talk to me. 



A. E. Housman 251 

When I was one-and-twenty 

I heard him say again, 
"The heart out of the bosom 

Was never given in vain; 
'Tis paid with sighs a-plenty 

And sold for endless rue." 
And I am two-and-twenty, 

And oh, 'tis true, 'tis true. 



TO AN ATHLETE DYING YOUNG 

The time you won your town the race 
We chaired you through the market-place; 
Man and boy stood cheering by, 
And home we brought you shoulder-high. 

Today, the road all runners come, 
Shoulder-high we bring you home, 
And set you at your threshold down, 
Townsman of a stiller town. 

Smart lad, to slip betimes away 
From fields where glory does not stay, 
And early though the laurel grows, 
It withers quicker than the rose. 

Eyes the shady night has shut 
Cannot see the record cut, 
And silence sounds no worse than cheers 
After earth has stopped the ears: 

Now you will not swell the rout 
Of lads that wore their honours out, 
Runners whom renown outran 
And the name died before the man. 



252 A. E. Housman 

So set, before its echoes fade, 
The fleet foot on the sill of shade, 
And hold to the low lintel up 
The still-defended challenge-cup. 

And round that early-laurelled head 
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead, 
And find unwithered on its curls 
The garland briefer than a girl's. 



Katharine Tynan Hinkson 

Katharine Tynan was born at Dublin in 1861, and edu- 
cated at the Convent of St. Catherine at Drogheda. She mar- 
ried Henry Hinkson, a lawyer and author, in 1893. Her 
poetry is largely actuated by religious themes, and much of 
her verse is devotional and yet distinctive. In New Poems 
(1911) she is at her best; graceful, meditative and with occa- 
sional notes of deep pathos. 



SHEEP AND LAMBS 

All in the April morning, 

April airs were abroad; 
The sheep with their little lambs 

Pass'd me by on the road. 

The sheep with their little lambs 
Pass'd me by on the road; 

All in an April evening 

I thought on the Lamb of God. 

The lambs were weary, and crying 
With a weak human cry; 

I thought on the Lamb of God 
Going meekly to die. 



Katharine Tynan Hinkson 253 

Up in the blue, blue mountains 

Dewy pastures are sweet: 
Rest for the little bodies, 

Rest for the little feet. 



Rest for the Lamb of God 

Up on the hill-top green; 
Only a cross of shame 

Two stark crosses between. 

All in the April evening, 

April airs were abroad; 
I saw the sheep with their lambs, 

And thought on the Lamb of God. 



Henry Newbolt 



Henry Newbolt was born at Bilston, Staffordshire, in 1862. 
His early work was frankly imitative of Tennyson; he even 
attempted to add to the Arthurian legends with a drama in 
blank verse entitled Mordred (1895). It was not until he 
wrote his sea-ballads that he struck his own note. With the 
publication of Admirals All (1897) his fame was widespread. 
The popularity of his lines was due not so much to the sub- 
ject-matter of Newbolt's verse as to the breeziness of his 
music, the solid beat of rhythm, the vigorous swing of his 
stanzas. 



DRAKE'S DRUM 

Drake he's in his hammock an' a thousand mile away, 
(Capten, art tha sleepin' there below?) 

Slung atween the round shot in Nombre Dios Bay, 
An/ dreamin' arl the time o' Plymouth Hoe. 



254 Henry Newbolt 

Yarnder lumes the island, yarnder lie the ships, 

Wi' sailor lads a-dancin' heel-an'-toe, 
An' the shore-lights flashin', an' the night-tide dashin' 

He sees et arl so plainly as he saw et long ago. 

Drake he was a Devon man, an' ruled the Devon seas, 

(Capten, art tha sleepin' there below?), 
Rovin' tho' his death fell, he went wi' heart at ease, 

An' dreamin' arl the time o' Plymouth Hoe, 
"Take my drum to England, hang et by the shore, 

Strike et when your powder's runnin' low; 
If the Dons sight Devon, I'll quit the port o' Heaven, 

An' drum them up the Channel as we drummed 
them long ago." 

Drake he's in his hammock till the great Armadas come, 

(Capten, art tha sleepin' there below?), 
Slung atween the round shot, listenin' for the drum, 

An' dreamin' arl the time o' Plymouth Hoe. 
Call him on the deep sea, call him up the Sound, 

Call him when ye sail to meet the foe; 
Where the old trade's plyin' an' the old flag's flying 

They shall find him, ware an' wakin', as they found 
him long ago. 



Arthur Symons 

Born in Wales in 1865, Arthur Symons' first few publica- 
tions revealed an intellectual rather than an emotional pas- 
sion. Those volumes were full of the artifice of the period, 
but Symons's technical skill and frequent analysis often saved 
the poems from complete decadence. 

The best of his poetry up to 1902 was collected in two 
volumes, Poems, published by John Lane Co. The Fool of the 
World appeared in 1907. 



Arthur Symons 255 



IN THE WOOD OF FINVARA 

I have grown tired of sorrow and human tears; 
Life is a dream in the night, a fear among fears, 
A naked runner lost in a storm of spears. 

I have grown tired of rapture and love's desire; 

Love is a flaming heart, and its flames aspire 

Till they cloud the soul in the smoke of a windy fire. 

I would wash the dust of the world in a soft green flood ; 
Here between sea and sea, in the fairy wood, 
I have found a delicate, wave-green solitude. 

Here, in the fairy wood, between sea and sea, 
I have heard the song of a fairy bird in a tree, 
And the peace that is not in the world has flown to me. 



THE CRYING OF WATER 

O water, voice of my heart, crying in the sand, 

All night long crying with a mournful cry, 

As I lie and listen, and cannot understand 

The voice of my heart in my side or the voice of the sea, 

O water crying for rest, is it I, is it I ? 

All night long the water is crying to me. 

Unresting water, there shall never be rest 

Till the last moon drop and the last tide fail, 

And the fire of the end begin to burn in the west; 

And the heart shall be weary and wonder and cry like the 

sea, 
All life long crying without avail, 
As the water all night long is crying to me. 



256 



William Butler Yeats 



Born at Sandymount, Dublin, in 1865, the son of John B. 
Yeats, the Irish artist, the greater part of William Butler 
Yeats' childhood was spent in Sligo. Here he became imbued 
with the power and richness of native folk-lore; he drank in 
the racy quality through the quaint fairy stories and old 
wives' tales of the Irish peasantry. (Later he published a 
collection of these same stories.) 

It was in the activities of a "Young Ireland" society that 
Yeats became identified with the new spirit; he dreamed of 
a national poetry that would be written in English and yet 
would be definitely Irish. In a few years he became one of 
the leaders in the Celtic revival. He worked incessantly for 
the cause, both as propagandist and playwright; and, though 
his mysticism at times seemed the product of a cult rather 
than a Celt, his symbolic dramas were acknowledged to be 
full of a haunting, other-world spirituality. (See Preface.) 

The Hour Glass (1904), his second volume of "Plays for an 
Irish Theatre," includes his best one-act dramas with the 
exception of his unforgettable The Land of Heart's Desire 
(1894). The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) contains sev- 
eral of his most beautiful and characteristic poems; a later 
collection, The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), displays his 
recent, more colloquial manner. 



THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE 

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, 
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made ; 
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee, 
And live alone in the bee-loud glade. 

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes 

dropping slow, 
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the 

cricket sings ; 
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, 
And evening full of the linnet's wings. 



William Butler Yeats 257 

I will arise and go now, for always night and day 
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore ; 
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray, 
I hear it in the deep heart's core. 



THE SONG OF THE OLD MOTHER 

I rise in the dawn, and I kneel and blow 
Till the seed of the fire flicker and glow. 
And then I must scrub, and bake, and sw T eep, 
Till stars are beginning to blink and peep; 
But the young lie long and dream in their bed 
Of the matching of ribbons, the blue and the red, 
And their day goes over in idleness, 
And they sigh if the wind but lift up a tress. 
While I must w r ork, because I am old 
And the seed of the fire gets feeble and cold. 



AN OLD SONG RESUNG 

Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet; 
She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet. 
She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree ; 
But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree. 

In a field by the river my love and I did stand, 
And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand. 
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs ; 
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears. 



258 William Butler Yeats 

WHEN YOU ARE OLD 

When you are old and gray and full of sleep, 
And nodding by the fire, take down this book, 
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look 
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep ; 

How many loved your moments of glad grace, 
And loved your beauty with love false or true; 
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, 
And loved the sorrows of your changing face. 

And bending down beside the glowing bars 
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled 
And paced upon the mountains overhead 
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars. 



Rudyard Kipling 

Born at Bombay, India, December 30, 1865, (Joseph) Rud- 
yard Kipling, the author of a dozen contemporary classics, 
was educated in England. He returned, however, to India 
and took a position on the staff of "The Lahore Civil and 
Military Gazette," writing for the Indian press until about 
1890, when he went to England, where, with the exception of 
a short sojourn in America, he has lived ever since. 

Soldiers Three (1888) was the first of six collections of 
short stories brought out in "Wheeler's Railway Library." 
It was followed by the far more sensitive and searching 
Plain Tales from the Hills, Under the Deodars and The 
Phantom 'Rikshaw, which contains two of the best and most 
convincing ghost-stories in recent literature. 

These tales, however, display only one side of Kipling's 
extraordinary talents. As a writer of children's stories, he 
has few living equals. Wee Willie Winkie, which contains 
that stirring and heroic fragment "Drums of the Fore and 



Rudyard Kipling 259 

Aft," is only a trifle less notable than his more obviously 
juvenile collections. Just-So Stories and the two Jungle Books 
(prose interspersed with lively rhymes) are classics for young 
people of all ages. Kim, the novel of a super-Mowgli grown 
up, is a more mature masterpiece. 

Considered solely as a poet (see Preface), he is one of the 
most vigorous and unique figures of his time. The spirit of 
romance surges under his realities. His brisk lines conjure 
up the tang of a countryside in autumn, the tingle of salt 
spray, the rude sentiment of ruder natures, the snapping of a 
banner, the lurch and rumble of the sea. His poetry is 
woven of the stuff of myths but it never loses its hold on 
actualities. 

Kipling won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. His 
varied poems have been finally collected in a remarkable one- 
volume Inclusive Edition (1885-1918), an indispensable part 
of any student's library. 



GUNGA DIN 

You may talk o' gin an' beer 

When you're quartered safe out 'ere, 

An' you're sent to penny-fights an' Aldershot it; 

But if it comes to slaughter 

You will do your work on water, 

An' you'll lick the bloomin' boots of 'im that's got it. 

Now in Injia's sunny clime, 

Where I used to spend my time 

A-servin' of 'Er Majesty the Queen, 

Of all them black-faced crew 

The finest man I knew 

Was our regimental bhisti, 1 Gunga Din. 

1 The bhisti, or water-carrier, attached to regiments in India, 
is often one of the most devoted of the Queen's servants. He 
is also appreciated by the men. 



260 Rudyard Kipling 

It was "Din! Din! Din! 

You limping lump o' brick-dust, Gunga Din! 

Hi! slippy hitherao! 

Water, get it! Panee lao/ 1 

You squidgy-nosed old idol, Gunga Din!" 

The uniform 'e wore 

Was nothin' much before, 

An' rather less than 'arf o' that be'ind, 

For a twisty piece o' rag 

An' a goatskin water-bag 

Was all the field-equipment 'e could find. 

When the sweatin' troop-train lay 

In a sidin' through the day, 

Where the 'eat would make your bloomin' eyebrows crawl, 

We shouted "Harry By!" 2 

Till our throats were bricky-dry, 

Then w T e wopped 'im 'cause 'e couldn't serve us all. 

It was "Din! Din! Din! 

You 'eathen, where the mischief 'ave you been? 

You put some juldee 3 in it, 

Or I'll marrow 4 you this minute, 

If you don't fill up my helmet, Gunga Din!" 

'E would dot an' carry one 

Till the longest day was done, 

An' 'e didn't seem to know the use o' fear. 

1 Bring water swiftly. 

2 Tommy Atkins' equivalent for "O Brother!" 
8 Speed. 

4 Hit you. 



Rudyard Kipling 261 

If we charged or broke or cut, 

You could bet your bloomin' nut, 

'E'd be waitin' fifty paces right flank rear. 

With 'is mussick x on 'is back, 

'E would skip with our attack, 

An' watch us till the bugles made "Retire." 

An' for all 'is dirty 'ide, 

'E was white, clear white, inside 

When 'e went to tend the wounded under fire! 

It was "Din! Din! Din!" 

With the bullets kickin' dust-spots on the green. 

When the cartridges ran out, 

You could 'ear the front-files shout: 

"Hi! ammunition-mules an' Gunga Din!" 

I shan't forgit the night 

When I dropped be'ind the fight 

With a bullet where my belt-plate should 'a' been. 

I was chokin' mad with thirst, 

An' the man that spied me first 

Was our good old grinnin', gruntin' Gunga Din. 

'E lifted up my 'ead, 

An' 'e plugged me where I bled, 

An' 'e guv me 'arf-a-pint o' water — green; 

It was crawlin' an' it stunk, 

But of all the drinks I've drunk, 

I'm gratefullest to one from Gunga Din. 

It was "Din! Din! Din! 
'Ere's a beggar with a bullet through 'is spleen ; 
'E's chawin' up the ground an' e's kickin' all around: 
For Gawd's sake, git the water, Gunga Din!" 

1 Water-skin. 



262 Rudyard Kipling 

'E carried me away 

To where a dooli lay, 

An' a bullet come an' drilled the beggar clean. 

'E put me safe inside, 

An' just before 'e died: 

"I 'ope you liked your drink," sez Gunga Din. 

So I'll meet 'im later on 

In the place where 'e is gone — 

Where it's always double drill and no canteen; 

'E'll be squattin' on the coals 

Givin' drink to pore damned souls, 

An' I'll get a swig in Hell from Gunga Din! 

Din! Din! Din! 

You Lazarushian-leather Gunga Din! 

Tho' I've belted you an' flayed you, 

By the livin' Gawd that made you, 

You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din ! 



THE RETURN * 

Peace is declared, and I return 

To 'Ackneystadt, but not the same; 
Things 'ave transpired which made me learn 

The size and meanin' of the game. 
I did no more than others did, 

I don't know where the change began; 
I started as an average kid, 

I finished as a thinkin' man. 

// England was what England seems 
An not the England of our dreams, 

1 From The Five Nations by Rudyard Kipling. Copyright 
by Doubleday, Page & Co. and A. P. Watt & Son. 



Rudyard Kipling 263 

But only putty, brass, an paint, 

J 0w quick we'd drop 'erl But she ain't! 

Before my gappin' mouth could speak 

I 'eard it in my comrade's tone; 
I saw it on my neighbour's cheek 

Before I felt it flush my own. 
An' last it come to me — not pride, 

Nor yet conceit, but on the 'ole 
(If such a term may be applied), 

The makin's of a bloomin' soul. 

Rivers at night that cluck an' jeer, 

Plains which the moonshine turns to sea, 
Mountains that never let you near, 

An' stars to all eternity; 
An' the quick-breathin' dark that fills 

The 'ollows of the wilderness, 
When the wind worries through the 'ills — 

These may 'ave taught me more or less. 

Towns without people, ten times took, 

An' ten times left an' burned at last; 
An' starvin' dogs that come to look 

For owners when a column passed; 
An' quiet, 'omesick talks between 

Men, met by night, you never knew 
Until — 'is face — by shellfire seen — 

Once — an' struck off. They taught me, too. 

The day's lay-out — the mornin' sun 

Beneath your 'at-brim as you sight ; 
The dinner-'ush from noon till one, 

An' the full roar that lasts till night; 



264 Rudyard Kipling 

An' the pore dead that look so old 

An* was so young an hour ago, 
An' legs tied down before they're cold — 

These are the things which make you know. 

Also Time runnin' into years — 

A thousand Places left be'ind — 
An' men from both two 'emispheres 

Discussin' things of every kind; 
So much more near than I 'ad known, 

So much more great than I 'ad guessed — 
An' me, like all the rest, alone — 

But reachin' out to all the rest! 

So 'ath it come to me — not pride, 

Nor yet conceit, but on the 'ole 
(If such a term may be applied), 

The makin's of a bloomin' soul. 
But now, discharged, I fall away 

To do with little things again. . . . 
Gawd, '00 knows all I cannot say, 

Look after me in Thamesf ontein ! 

// England was what England seems 
An not the England of our dreams, 

But only putty, brass, an paint, 

J Ow quick we'd chuck 'erf But she ain't! 

AN ASTROLOGER'S SONG * 

To the Heavens above us 

O look and behold 
The Planets that love us 

All harnessed in gold! 

1 From Rewards and Fairies by Rudyard Kipling. Copy- 
right by Doubleday, Page and Co. and A. P. Watt & Son. 



Rudyard Kipling 265 

What chariots, what horses 

Against us shall bide 
While the Stars in their courses 

Do fight on our side? 

All thoughts, all desires, 

That are under the sun, 
Are one with their fires, 

As we also are one: 
All matter, all spirit, 

All fashion, all frame, 
Receive and inherit 

Their strength from the same. 

(Oh, man that deniest 

All power save thine own, 
Their power in the highest 

Is mightily shown. 
Not less in the lowest 

That power is made clear. 
Oh, man, if thou knowest, 

What treasure is here!) 

Earth quakes in her throes 

And we wonder for why! 
But the blind planet knows 

When her ruler is nigh; 
And, attuned since Creation 

To perfect accord, 
She thrills in her station 

And yearns to her Lord. 

The waters have risen, 

The springs are unbound — 
The floods break their prison, 

And ravin around. 



266 Rudyard Kipling 

No rampart withstands 'em, 
Their fury will last, 

Till the Sign that commands 'em 
Sinks low or swings past. 

Through abysses unproven 

And gulfs beyond thought, 
Our portion is woven, 

Our burden is brought. 
Yet They that prepare it, 

Whose Nature we share, 
Make us who must bear it 

Well able to bear. 

Though terrors o'ertake us 

Well not be afraid. 
No power can unmake us, 

Save that which has made. 
Nor yet beyond reason 

Or hope shall we fall — 
All things have their season, 

And Mercy crowns all! 

Then, doubt not, ye fearful — 

The Eternal is King — 
Up, heart, and be cheerful, 

And lustily sing : — 
What chariots, what horses 

Against us shall bide 
While the Stars in their courses 

Do fight on our side? 



Rudyard Kipling 267 

RECESSIONAL 

God of our fathers, known of old, 
Lord of our far-flung battle-line, 

Beneath whose awful hand we hold 
Dominion over palm and pine — 

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, 

Lest we forget — lest we forget ! 

The tumult and the shouting dies; 

The captains and the kings depart: 
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice, 

An humble and a contrite heart. 
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, 
Lest we forget — lest we forget ! 

Far-called, our navies melt away; 

On dune and headland sinks the fire: 
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday 

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! 
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, 
Lest we forget — lest we forget! 

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose 
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe, 

Such boastings as the Gentiles use, 
Or lesser breeds without the Law — 

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, 

Lest we forget — lest we forget! 

For heathen heart that puts her trust 

In reeking tube and iron shard, 
All valiant dust that builds on dust, 

And guarding, calls not Thee to guard, 
For frantic boast and foolish word — 
Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord! 



268 Lionel Johnson 

Born in 1867, Lionel (Pigot) Johnson received a classical 
education at Oxford, and his poetry is a faithful reflection of 
his studies in Greek and Latin literatures. Though he allied 
himself with the modern Irish poets, his Celtic origin is a 
literary myth; Johnson, having been converted to Catholicism 
in 1891, became imbued with Catholic and, later, with Irish 
traditions. His verse, while sometimes strained and over- 
decorated, is chastely designed, rich and, like that of the 
Cavalier poets of the seventeenth century, mystically devo- 
tional. Poems (1895) contains his best work. 

Johnson died in 1902 as a result of a fall. 



MYSTIC AND CAVALIER 

Go from me: I am one of those who fall. 
What! hath no cold wind swept your heart at all, 
In my sad company? Before the end, 
Go from me, dear my friend ! 

Yours are the victories of light : your feet 
Rest from good toil, where rest is brave and sweet: 
But after warfare in a mourning gloom, 
I rest in clouds of doom. 

Have you not read so, looking in these eyes? 
Is it the common light of the pure skies 
Lights up their shadowy depths? The end is set: 
Though the end be not yet. 

When gracious music stirs, and all is bright, 
And beauty triumphs through a courtly night; 
When I too joy, a man like other men : 
Yet, am I like them, then? 



Lionel Johnson 269 

And in the battle, when the horsemen sweep 
Against a thousand deaths, and fall on sleep: 
Who ever sought that sudden calm, if I 
Sought not? yet could not die! 

Seek with thine eyes to pierce this crystal sphere: 
Canst read a fate there, prosperous and clear? 
Only the mists, only the weeping clouds, 
Dimness and airy shrouds. 

Beneath, what angels are at work? What powers 
Prepare the secret of the fatal hours? 
See! the mists tremble, and the clouds are stirred: 
When comes the calling word? 

The clouds are breaking from the crystal ball, 
Breaking and clearing: and I look to fall. 
When the cold winds and airs of portent sweep, 
My spirit may have sleep. 

O rich and sounding voices of the air! 
Interpreters and prophets of despair: 
Priests of a fearful sacrament! I come, 

To make with you mine home. 



Ernest Dowson 

Ernest Dowson was born at Belmont Hill in Kent in 1867. 
His great-uncle was Alfred Domett (Browning's "Waring"), 
who was at one time Prime Minister of New Zealand. Dow- 
son, practically an invalid all his life, hid himself in miser- 
able surroundings; for almost two years he lived in sordid 
supper-houses known as "cabmen's shelters." He literally 
drank himself to death. 

His delicate and fantastic poetry was an attempt to escape 
from a reality too big and brutal for him. His passionate 



270 Ernest Dowson 

lyric, "I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion," 
a triumph of despair and disillusion, is an outburst in which 
Dowson epitomized himself — "One of the greatest lyrical 
poems of our time," writes Arthur Symons; "in it he has for 
once said everything, and he has said it to an intoxicating 
and perhaps immortal music." 

Dowson died obscure in 1900, one of the finest of modern 
minor poets. His life was the tragedy of a weak nature 
buffeted by a strong and merciless environment. 



TO ONE IN BEDLAM 

With delicate, mad hands, behind his sordid bars, 
Surely he hath his posies, which they tear and twine; 
Those scentless wisps of straw that, miserable, line 
His strait, caged universe, whereat the dull world stares. 

Pedant and pitiful. O, how his rapt gaze wars 
With their stupidity! Know they what dreams divine 
Lift his long, laughing reveries like enchanted wine, 
And make his melancholy germane to the stars'? 

O lamentable brother! if those pity thee, 

Am I not fain of all thy lone eyes promise me; 

Half a fool's kingdom, far from men who sow and reap, 

All their days, vanity? Better than mortal flowers, 

Thy moon-kissed roses seem: better than love or sleep, 

The star-crowned solitude of thine oblivious hours ! 



"A. E." 

(George William Russell) 

At Lurgan, a tiny town in the north of Ireland, George 
William Russell was born in 1867. He moved to Dublin when 
he was 10 years old and, as a young man, helped to form 



A. E." 271 



the group that gave rise to the Irish Renascence — the group 
of which William Butler Yeats, Doctor Douglas Hyde, Kath- 
arine Tynan and Lady Gregory were brilliant members. Be- 
sides being a splendid mystical poet, "A. E." is a painter of 
note, a fiery nationalist, a distinguished sociologist, a public 
speaker, a student of economics and one of the heads of the 
Irish Agricultural Association. 

The best of his mystical poetry is in Homeward: Songs by 
the Way (1894.) and The Earth Breath and Other Poems. 
Yeats has spoken of these poems as "revealing in all things 
a kind of scented flame consuming them from within." 



CONTINUITY 

No sign is made while empires pass, 
The flowers and stars are still His care, 
The constellations hid in grass, 
The golden miracles in air. 

Life in an instant will be rent, 

Where death is glittering blind and wild — 

The Heavenly Brooding is intent 

To that last instant on Its child. 

It breathes the glow in brain and heart, 
Life is made magical. Until 
Body and spirit are apart, 
The Everlasting works Its will. 

In that wild orchid that your feet 
In their next falling shall destroy, 
Minute and passionate and sweet 
The Mighty Master holds His joy. 

Though the crushed jewels droop and fade, 
The Artist's labors will not cease, 
And of the ruins shall be made 
Some yet more lovely masterpiece. 



272 "A. e: 



THE UNKNOWN GOD 

Far up the dim twilight fluttered 
Moth-wings of vapour and flame: 

The lights danced over the mountains, 
Star after star they came. 

The lights grew thicker unheeded, 
For silent and still were we; 

Our hearts were drunk with a beauty 
Our eyes could never see. 



Stephen Phillips 

Born in 1868, Stephen Phillips is best known as the author 
of Herod (1900), Paola and Francesca (1899), and Ulysses 
(1902) ; a poetic playwright who succeeded in reviving, for a 
brief interval, the blank verse drama on the modern stage. 

Phillips failed to "restore" poetic drama because he was, 
first of all, a lyric rather than a dramatic poet. In spite of 
certain moments of rhetorical splendor, his scenes are spec- 
tacular instead of emotional; his inspiration is 1 too often 
derived from other models. He died in 1915. 



FRAGMENT FROM "HEROD" 

Herod speaks: 

I dreamed last night of a dome of beaten gold 

To be a counter-glory to the Sun. 

There shall the eagle blindly dash himself, 

There the first beam shall strike, and there the moon 

Shall aim all night her argent archery; 



Stephen Phillips 273 

And it shall be the tryst of sundered stars, 

The haunt of dead and dreaming Solomon ; 

Shall send a light upon the lost in Hell, 

And flashings upon faces without hope. — 

And I will think in gold and dream in silver, 

Imagine in marble and conceive in bronze, 

Till it shall dazzle pilgrim nations 

And stammering tribes from undiscovered lands, 

Allure the living God out of the bliss, 

And all the streaming seraphim from heaven. 



A DREAM 

My dead love came to me, and said : 
"God gives me one hour's rest, 

To spend with thee on earth again : 
How shall we spend it best?" 

"Why, as of old," I said; and so 
We quarrelled, as of old: 

But, when I turned to make my peace, 
That one short hour was told. 



Laurence Binyon 

(Robert) Laurence Binyon was born at Lancaster, August 10, 
1869, a cousin of Stephen Phillips; in Primavera (1890) their 
early poems appeared together. Binyon's subsequent volumes 
showed little distinction until he published London Visions, 
which, in an enlarged edition in 1908, revealed a gift of char- 
acterization and a turn of speech in surprising contrast to 
his previous academic Lyrical Poems (1894). 



274 Laurence Binyon 



A SONG 

For Mercy, Courage, Kindness, Mirth, 
There is no measure upon earth. 
Nay, they wither, root and stem, 
If an end be set to them. 

Overbrim and overflow, 
If your own heart you would know; 
For the spirit born to bless 
Lives but in its own excess. 



THE UNSEEN FLOWER 

I think of a flower that no eye ever has seen, 

That springs in a solitary air. 
Is it no one's joy? It is beautiful as a queen 

Without a kingdom's care. 

We have built houses for Beauty, and costly shrines, 

And a throne in all men's view: 
But she was far on a hill where the morning shines 

And her steps were lost in the dew. 



Anthony C. Deane 

Anthony C. Deane was born in 1870 and was the Seatonian 
prizeman in 1905 at Clare College, Cambridge. He has been 
Vicar of All Saints, Ennismore Gardens, since 1916. His long 
list of light verse and essays includes many excellent paro- 
dies, the most brilliant and delightful being found in his New 
Rhymes for Old (1901). 



Anthony G. Deane 2J$ 



THE BALLAD OF THE BILLYCOCK 

It was the good ship Billycock, with thirteen men aboard, 
Athirst to grapple with their country's foes, — 

A crew, 'twill be admitted, not numerically fitted 
To navigate a battleship in prose. 

It was the good ship Billycock put out from Plymouth 
Sound, 
While lustily the gallant heroes cheered, 
And all the air was ringing with the merry bo'sun's sing- 
ing, 
Till in the gloom of night she disappeared. 

But when the morning broke on her, behold, a dozen 
ships, 

A dozen ships of France around her lay, 
(Or, if that isn't plenty, I will gladly make it twenty), 

And hemmed her close in Salamander Bay. 

Then to the Lord High Admiral there spake a cabin-boy: 
"Methinks," he said, "the odds are somewhat great, 

And, in the present crisis, a cabin-boy's advice is 
That you and France had better arbitrate!" 

"Pooh!" said the Lord High Admiral, and slapped his 
manly chest, 

"Pooh! That would be both cowardly and wrong; 
Shall I, a gallant fighter, give the needy ballad-writer 

No suitable material for ^ong? 

"Nay — is the shorthand-writer here? — I tell you, one and 
all, 

I mean to do my duty, as I ought; 
With eager satisfaction let us clear the decks for action 

And fight the craven Frenchmen!" So they fought. 



276 Anthony C. Deane 

And (after several stanzas which as yet are incomplete, 

Describing all the fight in epic style) 
When the Billycock was going, she'd a dozen prizes 
towing 

(Or twenty, as above) in single file! 

Ah, long in glowing English hearts the story will remain, 

The memory of that historic day, 
And, while we rule the ocean, we will picture with 
emotion 

The Billycock in Salamander Bay! 

P.S. — I've lately noticed that the critics — who, I think, 

In praising my productions are remiss — 
Quite easily are captured, and profess themselves en- 
raptured, 

By patriotic ditties such as this, 

For making which you merely take some dauntless Eng- 
lishmen, 

Guns, heroism, slaughter, and a fleet — ■ 
Ingredients you mingle in a metre with a jingle, 

And there you have your masterpiece complete! 

Why, then, with labour infinite, produce a book of verse 
To languish on the "All for Twopence ,, shelf? 

The ballad bold and breezy comes particularly easy — 
I mean to take to writing it myself ! 



William H. Davies 

According to his own biography, William Henry Davies was 
born in a public-house called Church House at Newport, in 
the County of Monmouthshire, April 20, 1870, of Welsh par- 
ents. He was, until Bernard Shaw "discovered" him, a cat- 



William H. Davies 277 

tleman, a berry-picker, a panhandler — in short, a vagabond. 
At the age of thirty-four he began to write poetry. In a 
preface to Davies' second book, The Autobiography of a Super- 
Tramp (1906), Shaw describes how the manuscript came into 
his hands: 

"In the year 1905 I received by post a volume of poems 
by one William H. Davies, whose address was The Farm 
House, Kensington, S. E. The author, as far as I could 
guess, had walked into a printer's or stationer's shop; handed 
in his manuscript; and ordered his book as he might have 
ordered a pair of boots. It was marked 'price, half a crown.' 
An accompanying letter asked me very civilly if I required a 
half-crown book of verses; and if so, would I please send the 
author the half crown: if not, would I return the book. This 
was attractively simple and sensible. I opened the book, and 
was more puzzled than ever; for before I had read three 
lines I perceived that the author was a real poet. His work 
was not in the least strenuous or modern; there was indeed 
no sign of his ever having read anything otherwise than as a 
child reads." 

It is more than likely that Davies' first notoriety as a 
tramp-poet who had ridden the rails in the United States and 
had had his right foot cut off by a train in Canada, obscured 
his merits as a genuine singer. Even his early The Soul's 
Destroyer (1907) revealed that simplicity which is as naif 
as it is strange. The books that followed are more clearly 
melodious, more like the visionary wonder of Blake, more 
artistically artless and always lyrical. 

The best of these volumes have been condensed in The Col- 
lected Poems of W. H. Davies (1916), the following verses 
being reprinted by permission of the publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. 



DAYS TOO SHORT 

When primroses are out in Spring, 

And small, blue violets come between; 
When merry birds sing on boughs green, 

And rills, as soon as born, must sing; 



278 William H. Davies 

When butterflies will make side-leaps, 
As though escaped from Nature's hand 
Ere perfect quite; and bees will stand 

Upon their heads in fragrant deeps; 

When small clouds are so silvery white 
Each seems a broken rimmed moon — 
When such things are, this world too soon, 

For me, doth wear the veil of Night. 



THE MOON 

Thy beauty haunts me heart and soul, 
Oh, thou fair Moon, so close and bright; 

Thy beauty makes me like the child 
That cries aloud to own thy light: 

The little child that lifts each arm 

To press thee to her bosom warm. 

Though there are birds that sing this night 
With thy white beams across their throats; 

Let my deep silence speak for me 

More than for them their sweetest notes: 

Who worships thee till music fails, 

Is greater than thy nightingales. 



THE EXAMPLE 

Here's an example from 

A Butterfly; 
That on a rough, hard rock 

Happy can lie; 
Friendless and all alone 
On this unsweetened stone. 



William H. Davies 279 

Now let my bed be hard, 

No care take I; 
I'll make my joy like this 

Small Butterfly; 
Whose happy heart has power 
To make a stone a flower. 



A GREETING 

Good morning, Life — and all 
Things glad and beautiful. 
My pockets nothing hold, 
But he that owns the gold, 
The Sun, is my great friend — 
His spending has no end. 

Hail to the morning sky, 
Which bright clouds measure high ; 
Hail to you birds whose throats 
Would number leaves by notes; 
Hail to you shady bowers, 
And you green fields of flowers. 

Hail to you women fair, 
That make a show so rare 
In cloth as white as milk — 
Be't calico or silk: 
Good morning, Life — and all 
Things glad and beautiful. 



/. M. Synge 



J. M. Synge, the most brilliant star of the Celtic revival, 
was born at Rathfarnham, near Dublin, in 1871. As a child 



>8o J. M. Synge 



in Wicklow, he was already fascinated by the strange idioms 
and the rhythmic speech he heard there, a native utterance 
which was his greatest delight and which was to be rich 
material for his greatest work. 

For some time, Synge's career was uncertain. He went to 
Germany, half intending to become a professional musician. 
There he studied the theory of music, perfecting himself mean- 
while in Gaelic and Hebrew, winning prizes in both of these 
languages. Yeats found him in France in 1898 and advised 
him to go to the Aran Islands, to live there as if he were one 
of the people. "Express a lif e,'' said Yeats, "that has never 
found expression." 

The result of this close contact was four of the greatest 
poetic prose dramas not only of Synge's own generation, but of 
several generations preceding it. (See Preface.) 

In Riders to the Sea (1903), The Well of the Saints (1905), 
and The Playboy of the Western World (1907) we have a 
richness of imagery, a new language startling in its vigor, a 
wildness and passion that contrast strangely with the suave 
mysticism and delicate spirituality of his associates in the 
Irish Theatre. 

Synge's Poems and Translations (1910), a volume which was 
not issued until after his death, contains not only his few hard 
and earthy verses, but also Synge's prose-poems and his fa- 
mous theory of poetry. 

Synge died, just as he was beginning to attain fame, at a 
private hospital in Dublin March 24, 1909. 



PRELUDE 

Still south I went and west and south again, 
Through Wicklow from the morning till the night, 
And far from cities and the sights of men, 
Lived with the sunshine and the moon's delight. 

I knew the stars, the flowers, and the birds, 

The grey and wintry sides of many glens, 

And did but half remember human words, 

In converse with the mountains, moors and fens. 



/. M. Synge 281 

A TRANSLATION FROM PETRARCH 

{He is Jealous of the Heavens and the Earth) 

What a grudge I am bearing the earth that has its arms 
about her, and is holding that face away from me, where 
I was finding peace from great sadness. 

What a grudge I am bearing the Heavens that are 
after taking her, and shutting her in with greediness, the 
Heavens that do push their bolt against so many. 

What a grudge I am bearing the blessed saints that 
have got her sweet company, that I am always seeking; 
and what a grudge I am bearing against Death, that is 
standing in her two eyes, and will not call me with a 
word. 



BEG-INNISH 

Bring Kateen-beug and Maurya Jude 

To dance in Beg-Innish, 1 

And when the lads (they're in Dunquin) 

Have sold their crabs and fish, 

Wave fawny shawls and call them in, 

And call the little girls who spin, 

And seven weavers from Dunquin, 

To dance in Beg-Innish. 

I'll play you jigs, and Maurice Kean, 
Where nets are laid to dry, 
Fve silken strings would draw a dance 
From girls are lame or shy; 

1 (The accent is on the last syllable.) 



282 /. M. Synge 

Four strings I've brought from Spain and France 
To make your long men skip and prance, 
Till stars look out to see the dance 
Where nets are laid to dry. 

Well have no priest or peeler in 
To dance in Beg-Innish; 
But we'll have drink from M'riarty Jim 
Rowed round while gannets fish, 
A keg with porter to the brim, 
That every lad may have his whim, 
Till we up sails with M'riarty Jim 
And sail from Beg-Innish. 



Eva Gore-Booth 

Eva Gore-Booth, the second daughter of Sir Henry Gore- 
Booth and the sister of Countess Marcievicz, was born in 
Sligo, Ireland, in 1871. She first appeared in "A. E.'s" an- 
thology, New Songs, in which so many of the modern Irish 
poets first came forward. 

Her initial volume, Poems (1898), showed practically no 
distinction — not even the customary "promise." But The One 
and the Many (1904) and The Sorrowful Princess (1907) re- 
vealed the gift of the Celtic singer who is half mystic, half 
minstrel. Primarily philosophic, her verse often turns to 
lyrics as haunting as the example here reprinted. 



THE WAVES OF BREFFNY 

The grand road from the mountain goes shining to the 
sea, 
And there is traffic on It and many a horse and cart, 
But the little roads of Cloonagh are dearer far to me 
And the little roads of Cloonagh go rambling through 
my heart. 



Eva Gore-Booth 283 

A great storm from the ocean goes shouting o'er the hill, 
And there is glory in it ; and terror on the wind : 

But the haunted air of twilight is very strange and still, 
And the little winds of twilight are dearer to my mind. 

The great waves of the Atlantic sweep storming on their 
w T ay, 
Shining green and silver with the hidden herring shoal ; 
But the little waves of Breffny have drenched my heart 
in spray, 
And the little waves of Breffny go stumbling through 
my soul. 



Moira O'Neill 

Moira O'Neill is known chiefly by a remarkable little col- 
lection of only twenty-five lyrics, Songs from the Glens of 
Antrim (1900), simple tunes as unaffected as the peasants of 
whom she sings. The best of her poetry is dramatic without 
being theatrical; it is melodious without falling into the tinkle 
of most "popular" sentimental verse. 



A BROKEN SONG 

"Where am I from?" From the green hills of Erin. 
"Have I no song then?" My songs are all sung. 
"What o' my love?" 'Tis alone I am farin'. 
Old grows my heart, an' my voice yet is young. 

"If she was tall?" Like a king's own daughter. 
"If she was fair?" Like a mornin' o' May. 
When she'd come laughin' 'twas the runnin' wather, 
When she'd come blushin' 'twas the break o' day. 



284 Moira O'Neill 

"Where did she dwell?" Where one'st I had my 

dwellin'. 
"Who loved her best?" There's no one now will know. 
"Where is she gone?" Och, why would I be tellm' ! 
Where she is gone there I can never go. 



Ralph Hodgson 

This exquisite poet was born in Northumberland in 1871. 
One of the most graceful of the younger word-magicians, 
Ralph Hodgson will retain his freshness as long as there 
are lovers of such rare songs as his "Eve," the lengthier 
"The Song of Honor," and that memorable snatch of music, 
"Time, You Old Gypsy Man." 

Hodgson's verses, full of the love of all natural things, a 
love that goes out to 

"an idle rainbow 
No less than laboring seas," 

were originally brought out in small pamphlets, and distributed 
by Flying Fame. A collected Poems appeared in America in 
1917. 



THE BIRDCATCHER 

When flighting time is on, I go 
With clap-net and decoy, 
A-fowling after goldfinches 
And other birds of joy; 

I lurk among the thickets of 
The Heart where they are bred, 
And catch the twittering beauties as 
They fly into my Head. 



Ralph Hodgson 285 



TIME, YOU OLD GYPSY MAN 

Time, you old gypsy man, 

Will you not stay, 
Put up your caravan 

Just for one day? 



All things I'll give you 
Will you be my guest, 
Bells for your jennet 
Of silver the best, 
Goldsmiths shall beat you 
A great golden ring, 
Peacocks shall bow to you, 
Little boys sing, 
Oh, and sweet girls w T ill 
Festoon you with may. 
Time, you old gypsy, 
Why hasten away? 

Last week in Babylon, 
Last night in Rome, 
Morning, and in the crush 
Under Paul's dome; 
Under Paul's dial 
You tighten your rein- 
Only a moment, 
And off once again ; 
Off to some city 
Now blind in the womb, 
Off to another 
Ere that's in the tomb. 



286 Ralph Hodgson 

Time, you old gypsy man, 
Will you not stay, 

Put up your caravan 
Just for one day? 



AFTER 

"How fared you when you mortal were? 

What did you see on my peopled star?" 
"Oh, well enough," I answered her, 

It went for me where mortals are! 

"I saw blue flowers and the merlin's flight, 
And the rime on the wintry tree; 

Blue doves I saw and summer light 
On the wings of the cinnamon bee." 



THE MYSTERY 

He came and took me by the hand 

Up to a red rose tree, 
He kept His meaning to Himself 

But gave a rose to me. 

I did not pray Him to lay bare 

The mystery to me, 
Enough the rose was Heaven to smell, 

And His own face to see. 



John McCrae 

John McCrae was born in Guelph, Ontario, Canada, in 
1872. He was graduated in arts in 1894 an d m medicine in 



John McCrae 287 

1898. He finished his studies at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore 
and returned to Canada, joining the staff of the Medical 
School of McGill University. He was a lieutenant of ar- 
tillery in South Africa (1899-1900) and was in charge of 
the Medical Division of the McGill Canadian General Hos- 
pital during the World War. After serving two years, he 
died of pneumonia, January, 1918, his volume In Flanders 
Fields (1919) appearing posthumously. 

Few who read the title poem of his book, possibly the most 
widely-read poem produced by the war, realize that it is a 
perfect rondeau, one of the loveliest (and strictest) of the 
French forms. 

IN FLANDERS FIELDS 

In Flanders fields the poppies blow 

Between the crosses, row on row, 

That mark our place; and in the sky 
The larks, still bravely singing, fly 

Scarce heard amid the guns below. 

We are the Dead. Short days ago 
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, 
Loved and were loved, and now we lie 
In Flanders fields. 

Take up our quarrel with the foe : 
To you from failing hands we throw 

The torch; be yours to hold it high. 

If ye break faith with us who die 
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow 
In Flanders fields. 



Walter Be la Mare 

The author of some of the most haunting lyrics in contem- 
porary poetry, Walter (John) De la Mare, was born in 1873. 



288 Walter De la Mare 

Although he did not begin to bring out his work in book 
form until he was over 30, he is, as Harold Williams has 
written, "the singer of a young and romantic world, a singer 
even for children, understanding and perceiving as a child." 
De la Mare paints simple scenes of miniature loveliness; he 
uses thin-spun fragments of fairy-like delicacy and achieves 
a grace that is remarkable in its universality. 

De la Mare is an astonishing joiner of words; in Peacock 
Pie (191 3) he surprises us again and again by transforming 
what began as a child's nonsense-rhyme into a suddenly 
thrilling snatch of music. These magical poems read like 
lyrics of William Shakespeare rendered by Mother Goose. 
The trick of revealing the ordinary in whimsical colors, of 
catching the commonplace off its guard, is the first of De la 
Mare's two magics. 

This poet's second gift is his sense of the supernatural, of 
the fantastic other-world that lies on the edges of our con- 
sciousness. The Listeners (1912) is a book that, like all the 
best of De la Mare, is full of half-heard whispers; moonlight 
and mystery seem soaked in the lines and a cool wind from 
Nowhere blows over them. That most magical of modern 
verses, "The Listeners," is an example. In this poem there 
is an uncanny splendor. What we have here is the effect, the 
thrill, the overtones of a ghost story rather than the nar- 
rative itself — the half-told adventure of some new Childe 
Roland heroically challenging a heedless universe. 

Some of his earlier poems and stories appeared originally 
under the pseudonym, Walter Ramal; his most remarkable 
prose, Memoirs of a Midget (1921), is an addition to the per- 
manent literature of great novels. 



THE LISTENERS 

"Is there anybody there ?" said the Traveller, 

Knocking on the moonlit door; 
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses 

Of the forest's ferny floor. 
And a bird flew up out of the turret, 

Above the Traveller's head: 



Walter De la Mare 289 

And he smote upon the door again a second time; 

"Is there anybody there?" he said. 
But no one descended to the Traveller; 

No head from the leaf-fringed sill 
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes, 

Where he stood perplexed and still. 
But only a host of phantom listeners 

That dwelt in the lone house then 
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight 

To that voice from the world of men: 
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair, 

That goes down to the empty hall, 
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken 

By the lonely Traveller's call. 
And he felt in his heart their strangeness, 

Their stillness answering his cry, 
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf, 

'Neath the starred and leafy sky; 
For he suddenly smote on the door, even 

Louder, and lifted his head: — 
"Tell them I came, and no one answered, 

That I kept my word," he said. 
Never the least stir made the listeners, 

Though every word he spake 
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house 

From the one man left awake: 
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup, 

And the sound of iron on stone, 
And how the silence surged softly backward, 

When the plunging hoofs were gone. 

OLD SUSAN 

When Susan's work was done, she'd sit 
With one fat guttering candle lit, 



290 Walter De la Mare 

And window opened wide to win 
The sweet night air to enter in; 
There, with a thumb to keep her place, 
She'd read, with stern and wrinkled face. 
Her mild eyes gliding very slow 
Across the letters to and fro, 
While wagged the guttering candle flame 
In the wind that through the window came. 

And sometimes in the silence she 

Would mumble a sentence audibly, 

Or shake her head as if to say, 

"You silly souls, to act this way!" 

And never a sound from night I'd hear, 

Unless some far-off cock crowed clear ; 

Or her old shuffling thumb should turn 

Another page; and rapt and stern, 

Through her great glasses bent on me 

She'd glance into reality; 

And shake her round old silvery head, 

With — "You! — I thought you was in bed!"- 

Only to tilt her book again, 

And rooted in Romance remain. 



SILVER 

Slowly, silently, now the moon 
Walks the night in her silver shoon; 
This way, and that, she peers, and sees 
Silver fruit upon silver trees; 
One by one the casements catch 
Her beams beneath the silvery thatch; 
Couched in his kennel, like a log, 
With paws of silver sleeps the dog; 



Walter De la Mare zgi 

From their shadowy cote the white breasts peep 
Of doves in a silver-feathered sleep; 
A harvest mouse goes scampering by, 
With silver claws and a silver eye; 
And moveless fish in the water gleam, 
By silver reeds in a silver stream. 



NOD 

■ 

Softly along the road of evening, 

In a twilight dim with rose, 
Wrinkled with age, and drenched with dew 

Old Nod, the shepherd, goes. 

His drowsy flock streams on before him, 
Their fleeces charged with gold, 

To where the sun's last beam leans low 
On Nod the shepherd's fold. 

The hedge is quick and green with briar, 
From their sand the conies creep; 

And all the birds that fly in heaven 
Flock singing home to sleep. 

His lambs outnumber a noon's roses, 
Yet, when night's shadows fall, 

His blind old sheep-dog, Slumber-soon, 
Misses not one of all. 

His are the quiet steeps of dreamland, 

The waters of no-more-pain; 
His ram's bell rings 'neath an arch of stars, 

"Rest, rest, and rest again." 



292 G. K. Chesterton 

The brilliant journalist, novelist, essayist, publicist and 
lyricist, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, was born at Campden Hill, 
Kensington, in 1874, and began his literary life by reviewing 
books on art for various magazines. He is best known as a 
writer of flashing, paradoxical essays on anything and every- 
thing, like Tremendous Trifles (1909), Varied Types (1905), 
and All Things Considered (1910). But he is also a stimu- 
lating critic; a keen appraiser, as in his volume Heretics 
(1905) and his analytical studies of Robert Browning, Charles 
Dickens and George Bernard Shaw; a writer of strange and 
grotesque romances like The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1906), 
The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) and The Flying Inn 
(1914) ; the author of several books of fantastic short stories, 
ranging from the wildly whimsical narratives in The Club of 
Queer Trades (1905) to that amazing sequence The Innocence 
of Father Brown (1911) — which is a series of religious de- 
tective stories! 

Besides being the creator of all of these, Chesterton finds 
time to be a prolific if sometimes too acrobatic newspaperman, 
a lay preacher in disguise (witness Orthodoxy [1908], What's 
Wrong with the World? [1910], The Ball and the Cross 
[1909]) a pamphleteer, and a poet. His first volume of verse, 
The Wild Knight and Other Poems (1900), a collection of 
quaintly-flavored and affirmative verses, was followed by The 
Ballad of the White Horse (1911). 

"Lepanto," from the later Poems (1915), anticipating the 
banging, clanging verses of Vachel Lindsay's "The Congo," 
is one of the finest of modern chants. It is interesting to see 
how the syllables beat as though on brass; it is thrilling to 
feel how, in one's pulses, the armies sing, the feet tramp, the 
drums snarl, and the tides of marching crusaders roll out of 
lines like: 

"Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far, 
Don John of Austria is going to the war; 
Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold 
In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold; 
Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums, 
Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, and he 
comes. . . ." 

Chesterton, the prose-paradoxer, is a delightful product of 
a skeptical age. But it is Chesterton the poet who is more 
likely to outlive it. 



G. K. Chesterton 293 

LEPANTO * 

White founts falling in the Courts of the sun, 
And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run; 
There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all 

men feared, 
It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard ; 
It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips; 
For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships. 
They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy, 
They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea, 
And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss, 
And called the kings of Christendom for swords about 

the Cross. 
The cold queen of England is looking in the glass; 
The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass ; 
From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun, 
And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the 

sun. 

Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard, 

Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has 

stirred, 
Where, risen from a doubtful seat and half attainted stall, 
The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall, 
The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has 

sung, 
That once went singing southward when all the world 

was young. 
In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid, 
Comes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade. 

1 From Poems by G. K. Chesterton. Copyright by the John 
Lane Co. and reprinted by permission of the publishers. 



294 ^- K. Chesterton 

Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far, 

Don John of Austria is going to the war, 

Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold 

In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold, 

Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums, 

Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, 

and he comes. 
Don John laughing in the brave beard curled, 
Spurning of his stirrups like the thrones of all the world, 
Holding his head up for a flag of all the free. 
Love-light of Spain — hurrah! 
Death-light of Africa! 
Don John of Austria 
Is riding to the sea. 

Mahound is in his paradise above the evening star, 
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.) 
He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri's knees, 
His turban that is woven of the sunsets and the seas. 
He shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease, 
And he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the 

trees ; 
And his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to 

bring 
Black Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing. 
Giants and the Genii, 
Multiplex of wing and eye, 
Whose strong obedience broke the sky 
When Solomon was king. 

They rush in red and purple from the red clouds of the 

morn, 
From the temples where the yellow gods shut up their 

eyes in scorn; 



G. K. Chesterton 295 

They rise in green robes roaring from the green hells of 

the sea 
Where fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless creatures be, 
On them the sea-valves cluster and the grey sea-forests 

curl, 
Splashed with a splendid sickness, the sickness of the 

pearl ; 
They swell in sapphire smoke out of the blue cracks of 

the ground, — 
They gather and they wonder and give worship to 

Mahound. 
And he saith, "Break up the mountains where the her- 
mit-folk can hide, 
And sift the red and silver sands lest bone of saint abide, 
And chase the Giaours flying night and day, not giving 

rest, 
For that which was our trouble comes again out of the 

west. 
We have set the seal of Solomon on all things under sun, 
Of knowledge and of sorrow and endurance of things 

done. 
But a noise is in the mountains, in the mountains, and I 

know 
The voice that shook our palaces — four hundred years 

ago: 
It is he that saith not 'Kismet' ; it is he that knows not 

Fate ; 
It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey at the gate! 
It is he whose loss is laughter when he counts the wager 

worth, 
Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the 

earth." 
For he heard drums groaning and he heard guns jar, 
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.) 



296 G. K. Chesterton 

Sudden and still — hurrah! 
Bolt from Iberia! 
Don John of Austria 
Is gone by Alcalar. 

St. Michael's on his Mountain in the sea-roads of the 

north 
{Don John of Austria is girt and going forth.) 
Where the grey seas glitter and the sharp tides shift 
And the sea-folk labour and the red sails lift. 
He shakes his lance of iron and he claps his wings of 

stone ; 
The noise is gone through Normandy; the noise is gone 

alone ; 
The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching 

eyes, 
And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise, 
And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room, 
And Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face 

of doom, 
And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee, — 
But Don John of Austria is riding to the sea. 
Don John calling through the blast and the eclipse 
Crying with the trumpet, with the trumpet of his lips, 
Trumpet that sayeth ha! 

Domino gloria! 
Don John of Austria 
Is shouting to the ships. 

The Pope was in his chapel before day or battle broke, 

{Don John of Austria is hidden in the smoke.) 

The hidden room in man's house where God sits all the 

year, 
The secret window whence the world looks small and 

very dear. 



G. K. Chesterton 297 

He sees as in a mirror on the monstrous twilight sea 
The crescent of his cruel ships whose name is mystery; 
They fling great shadows foe-wards, making Cross and 

Castle dark, 
They veil the plumed lions on the galleys of St. Mark; 
And above the ships are palaces of brown, black-bearded 

chiefs, 
And below the ships are prisons, where with multitudi- 
nous griefs, 
Christian captives sick and sunless, all a labouring race 

repines 
Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines. 
They are lost like slaves that swat, and in the skies of 

morning hung 
The stair-ways of the tallest gods when tyranny was 

young. 
They are countless, voiceless, hopeless as those fallen or 

fleeing on 
Before the high Kings' horses in the granite of Babylon. 
And many a one grows witless in his quiet room in hell 
Where a yellow face looks inward through the lattice of 

his cell, [sign — 

And he finds his God forgotten, and he seeks no more a 
(But Don John of Austria has burst the battle-line!) 
Don John pounding from the slaughter-painted poop, 
Purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate's sloop, 
Scarlet running over on the silvers and the golds, 
Breaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds, 
Thronging of the thousands up that labour under sea 
White ror bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty. 
Vivat Hispania! 
Domino Gloria! 
Don John of Austria 
Has set his people free! 



298 G. K. Chesterton 

Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath 
{Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.) 
And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in 

Spain, 
Up which a lean and foolish knight for ever rides in vain, 
And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back 

the blade. . . . 
{But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.) 

THE DONKEY 

When fishes flew and forests walked 

And figs grew upon thorn, 
Some moment when the moon was blood, 

Then surely I was born; 

With monstrous head and sickening cry 

And ears like errant wings, 
The devil's walking parody 

On all four-footed things. 

The tattered outlaw of the earth, 

Of ancient crooked will; 
Starve, scourge, deride me : I am dumb, 

I keep my secret still. 

Fools! For I also had my hour; 

One far fierce hour and sweet: 
There was a shout about my ears, 

And palms before my feet. 



John Masefield 

John Masefield was born June 1, 1874, in Ledbury, Hert- 
fordshire. He was the son of a lawyer but, being of a rest- 



John Masefield 299 

less disposition, he took to the sea at an early age and became 
a wanderer for several years. At one time (in 1895, to be 
exact) he worked for a few months as a sort of third assist- 
ant barkeeper and dish-washer in Luke O'Connor's saloon, 
the Columbia Hotel, in New York City. The place is still 
there on the corner of Sixth and Greenwich Avenues. 

The results of his wanderings showed in his early works, 
Salt-Water Ballads (1902), Ballads (1903), frank and often 
crude poems of sailors written in their own dialect, and A 
Mainsail Haul (1905), a collection of short nautical stories. 

It was not until he published The Everlasting Mercy (1911) 
that he became famous. Followed quickly by those remark- 
able long narrative poems, The Widow in the Bye Street 
(1912), Dauber (1912), and The Daffodil Fields (1913), there 
is in all of these that peculiar blend of physical exulting and 
spiritual exaltation that is so striking, and so typical of Mase- 
field. Their very rudeness is lifted to a plane of religious 
intensity. (See Preface.) 

The war, in which Masefield served with the Red Cross in 
France and on the Gallipoli peninsula (of which campaign he 
wrote a study for the government), softened his style; Good 
Friday and Other Poems (1916) is as restrained and dignified 
a collection as that of any of his contemporaries. Reynard 
the Fox (1919) is the best of his new manner with a return 
of the old vivacity. 

Masefield has also written several novels of which Multitude 
and Solitude (1909) is the most outstanding; half a dozen 
plays, ranging from the classical solemnity of Pompey the 
Great to the hot and racy Tragedy of Nan; and one of the 
freshest, most creative critiques of Shakespeare (1911) in the 
last generation. 

A CONSECRATION 

Not of the princes and prelates with periwigged 

charioteers 
Riding triumphantly laurelled to lap the fat of the 

years, — 
Rather the scorned — the rejected — the men hemmed in 

with the spears; 



300 John Masefield 

The men of the tattered battalion which fights till it dies, 
Dazed with the dust of the battle, the din and the cries. 
The men with the broken heads and the blood running 
into their eyes. 

Not the be-medalled Commander, beloved of the throne, 
Riding cock-horse to parade when the bugles are blown, 
But the lads who carried the koppie and cannot be known. 

Not the ruler for me, but the ranker, the tramp of the 

road, 
The slave with the sack on his shoulders pricked on with 

the goad, 
The man with too weighty a burden, too weary a load. 

The sailor, the stoker of steamers, the man with the clout, 
The chantyman bent at the halliards putting a tune to 

the shout, 
The drowsy man at the wheel and the tired look-out. 

Others may sing of the wine and the wealth and the 

mirth, 
The portly presence of potentates goodly in girth ; — 
Mine be the dirt and the dross, the dust and scum of the 

earth! 

Theirs be the music, the colour, the glory, the gold ; 

Mine be a handful of ashes, a mouthful of mould. 

Of the maimed, of the halt and the blind in the rain and 

the cold — 
Of these shall my songs be fashioned, my tales be told. 

Amen. 



John Masefield 301 



SEA-FEVER 

I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the 

sky, 
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by, 
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white 

sail's shaking, 
And a grey mist on the sea's face and a grey dawn 

breaking. 

I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running 
tide 

Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied ; 

And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying, 

And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea- 
gulls crying. 

I must down to the seas again to the vagrant gypsy life. 

To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's 
like a whetted knife; 

And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow- 
rover, 

And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's 
over. 

ROUNDING THE HORN 

{From "Dauber") l 

Then came the cry of "Call all hands on deck!" 
The Dauber knew its meaning; it was come: 
Cape Horn, that tramples beauty into wreck, 
And crumples steel and smites the strong man dumb. 

1 From The Story of a Round-House by John Masefield. 
Copyright, 1913, by The Macmillan Company. Reprinted by 
permission cf the publishers. 



302 John Masefield 

Down clattered flying kites and staysails; some 
Sang out in quick, high calls: the fair-leads skirled, 
And from the south-west came the end of the world . , 

"Lay out!" the Bosun yelled. The Dauber laid 

Out on the yard, gripping the yard, and feeling 

Sick at the mighty space of air displayed 

Below his feet, where mewing birds were wheeling. 

A giddy fear was on him ; he was reeling. 

He bit his lip half through, clutching the jack. 

A cold sweat glued the shirt upon his back. 

The yard was shaking, for a brace was loose. 

He felt that he would fall; he clutched, he bent, 

Clammy with natural terror to the shoes 

While idiotic promptings came and went. 

Snow fluttered on a wind-flaw and was spent; 

He saw the water darken. Someone yelled, 

"Frap it; don't stay to furl! Hold on!" He held. 

Darkness came down — half darkness — in a whirl; 
The sky went out, the waters disappeared. 
He felt a shocking pressure of blowing hurl 
The ship upon her side. The darkness speared 
At her with wind; she staggered, she careered; 
Then down she lay. The Dauber felt her go, 
He saw her yard tilt downwards. Then the snow 

Whirled all about — dense, multitudinous, cold — 
Mixed with the wind's one devilish thrust and shriek, 
Which whiffled out men's tears, defeated, took hold, 
Flattening the flying drift against the cheek. 
The yards buckled and bent, man could not speak. 
The ship lay on her broadside; the wind's sound 
Had devilish malice at having got her downed. 



John Masefield 303 

How long the gale had blown he could not tell, 
Only the world had changed, his life had died. 
A moment now was everlasting hell. 
Nature an onslaught from the weather side, 
A withering rush of death, a frost that cried, 
Shrieked, till he withered at the heart; a hail 
Plastered his oilskins with an icy mail. . . . 

"Up!" yelled the Bosun; "up and clear the wreck!" 

The Dauber followed where he led ; below 

He caught one giddy glimpsing of the deck 

Filled with white water, as though heaped with snow. 

He saw the streamers of the rigging blow 

Straight out like pennons from the splintered mast, 

Then, all sense dimmed, all was an icy blast. 

Roaring from nether hell and filled with ice, 
Roaring and crashing on the jerking stage, 
An utter bridle given to utter vice, 
Limitless power mad with endless rage 
Withering the soul ; a minute seemed an age. 
He clutched and hacked at ropes, at rags of sail, 
Thinking that comfort was a fairy tale, 

Told long ago — long, long ago — long since 
Heard of in other lives — imagined, dreamed — 
There where the basest beggar was a prince. 
To him in torment where the tempest screamed, 
Comfort and warmth and ease no longer seemed 
Things that a man could know; soul, body, brain, 
Knew nothing but the wind, the cold, the pain. 

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson 

Born at Hexam in 1878, Wilfrid Wilson Gibson has pub- 
lished almost a dozen books of verse — the first four or five 



304 Wilfrid Wilson Gibson 

(see Preface) being imitative in manner and sentimentally 
romantic in tone. With The Stonefolds (1907) and Daily 
Bread (1910), Gibson executed a complete right- about-face and, 
with dramatic brevity, wrote a series of poems mirroring the 
dreams, pursuits and fears of common humanity. Fires (1912) 
marks an advance in technique and power. And though in 
Livelihood (1917) Gibson seems to be theatricalizing and 
merely exploiting his working-people, his later lyrics fre- 
quently recapture the veracity. 



THE STONE 1 

"And will you cut a stone for him, 
To set above his head? 
And will you cut a stone for him — 
A stone for him?" she said. 

Three days before, a splintered rock 

Had struck her lover dead — 

Had struck him in the quarry dead, 

Where, careless of the warning call, 

He loitered, while the shot was fired — 

A lively stripling, brave and tall, 

And sure of all his heart desired . . . 

A flash, a shock, 

A rumbling fall . . . 

And, broken 'neath the broken rock, 

A lifeless heap, with face of clay; 

And still as any stone he lay, 

With eyes that saw the end of all. 

I went to break the news to her ; 
And I could hear my own heart beat 

1 From Fires by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson. Copyright, 1912, 
by The Macmillan Co. Reprinted by permission of the pub- 
lishers. 



Wilfrid Wilson Gibson 305 

With dread of what my lips might say. 
But some poor fool had sped before; 
And flinging wide her father's door, 
Had blurted out the news to her, 
Had struck her lover dead for her, 
Had struck the girl's heart dead in her, 
Had struck life, lifeless, at a word, 
And dropped it at her feet: 
Then hurried on his witless way, 
Scarce knowing she had heard. 

And when I came, she stood, alone 
A woman, turned to stone: 
And, though no word at all she said, 
I knew that all was known. 

Because her heart was dead, 

She did not sigh nor moan, 

His mother wept: 

She could not weep. 

Her lover slept : 

She could not sleep. 

Three days, three nights, 

She did not stir: 

Three days, three nights, 

Were one to her, 

Who never closed her eyes 

From sunset to sunrise, 

From dawn to evenfall: 

Her tearless, staring eyes, 

That seeing naught, saw all. 

The fourth night when I came from work, 

I found her at my door. 

"And will you cut a stone for him?" 



306 Wilfrid Wilson Gibson 

She said and spoke no more: 

But followed me, as I went in, 

And sank upon a chair; 

And fixed her grey eyes on my face, 

With still, unseeing stare. 

And, as she waited patiently, 

I could not bear to feel 

Those still, grey eyes that followed me, 

Those eyes that plucked the heart from me, 

Those eyes that sucked the breath from me 

And curdled the warm blood in me, 

Those eyes that cut me to the bone, 

And pierced my marrow like cold steel. 

And so I rose, and sought a stone; 

And cut it, smooth and square: 

And, as I worked, she sat and watched, 

Beside me, in her chair. 

Night after night, by candlelight, 

I cut her lover's name : 

Night after night, so still and white, 

And like a ghost she came; 

And sat beside me in her chair; 

And watched with eyes aflame. 

She eyed each stroke; 

And hardly stirred: 

She never spoke 

A single word: 

And not a sound or murmur broke 

The quiet, save the mallet-stroke. 

With still eyes ever on my hands, 

With eyes that seemed to burn my hands, 

My wincing, overwearied hands, 

She watched, with bloodless lips apart, 



Wilfrid Wilson Gibson 307 

And silent, indrawn breath: 
And every stroke my chisel cut, 
Death cut still deeper in her heart : 
The two of us were chiseling, 
Together, I and death. 

And when at length the job was done, 

And I had laid the mallet by, 

As if, at last, her peace were won, 

She breathed his name; and, with a sigh, 

Passed slowly through the open door: 

And never crossed my threshold more. 

Next night I laboured late, alone, 
To cut her name upon the stone. 



SIGHT 1 

By the lamplit stall I loitered, feasting my eyes 

On colours ripe and rich for the heart's desire — 

Tomatoes, redder than Krakatoa's fire, 

Oranges like old sunsets over Tyre, 

And apples golden-green as the glades of Paradise. 

And as I lingered, lost in divine delight, 

My heart thanked God for the goodly gift of sight 

And all youth's lively senses keen and quick . . . 

When suddenly, behind me in the night, 

I heard the tapping of a blind man's stick. 

1 From Borderlands and Thoroughfares by Wilfrid Wilson 
Gibson. Copyright, 191 5, by The Macmillan Company. Re- 
printed by permission of the publishers. 



3 o8 



Edward Thomas 



Edward Thomas, one of the little-known but most individual 
of modern English poets, was born in 1878. For many years 
before he turned to verse, Thomas had a large following as 
a critic and author of travel-books, biographies, pot-boilers. 
It needed something foreign to stir and animate what was 
native in him. So when Robert Frost, the New England poet, 
went abroad in 1912 for two years and became an intimate 
of Thomas's, the English critic began to write poetry. Lov- 
ing, like Frost, the minutia of existence, the quaint and casual 
turn of ordinary life, he caught the magic of the English 
countryside in its unpoeticized quietude. It is not disillusion, 
it is rather an absence of illusion. Poems (1917), dedicated 
to Robert Frost, is full of Thomas's fidelity to little things, 
things as unglorified as the unfreezing of the "rock-like mud," 
a child's path, a list of quaint-sounding villages, birds' nests 
uncovered by the autumn wind, dusty nettles. His lines glow 
with a deep reverence for the soil. 

Thomas was killed at Arras, at an observatory outpost, on 
Easter Monday, 1917. 



IF I SHOULD EVER BY CHANCE 

If I should ever by chance grow rich 

I'll buy Codham, Cockridden, and Childerditch, 

Roses, Pyrgo, and Lapwater, 

And let them all to my elder daughter. 

The rent I shall ask of her will be only 

Each year's first violets, white and lonely, 

The first primroses and orchises — 

She must find them before I do, that is. 

But if she finds a blossom on furze 

Without rent they shall all for ever be hers, 

Codham, Cockridden, and Childerditch, 

Roses, Pyrgo, and Lapwater, — 

I shall give them all to my elder daughter. 



Edward Thomas 309 



TALL NETTLES 

Tall nettles cover up, as they have done 
These many springs, the rusty harrow, the plough 
Long worn out, and the roller made of stone : 
Only the elm butt tops the nettles now. 

This corner of the farmyard I like most : 
As well as any bloom upon a flower 
I like the dust on the nettles, never lost 
Except to prove the sweetness of a shower. 



COCK-CROW 

Out of the wood of thoughts that grows by night 
To be cut down by the sharp axe of light, — 
Out of the night, two cocks together crow, 
Cleaving the darkness with a silver blow : 
And bright before my eyes twin trumpeters stand, 
Heralds of splendour, one at either hand, 
Each facing each as in a coat of arms: — 
The milkers lace their boots up at the farms. 



Seumas O' Sullivan 

James Starkey was born in Dublin in 1879. Writing under 
the pseudonym of Seumas O'Sullivan, he contributed a great 
variety of prose and verse to various Irish papers. His repu- 
tation as a poet began with his appearance in New Songs, 
edited by George Russell ("A. E."). Later, he published The 
Twilight People (1905), The Earth Lover (1909), and Poems 
(1912). 



310 Seumas 0' Sullivan 



PRAISE 

Dear, they are praising your beauty, 
The grass and the sky: 
The sky in a silence of wonder, 
The grass in a sigh. 

I too would sing for your praising, 
Dearest, had I 

Speech as the whispering grass, 
Or the silent sky. 

These have an art for the praising 
Beauty so high. 

Sweet, you are praised in a silence, 
Sung in a sigh. 



Charlotte Mew 

One of the most amazing figures in modern poetry is Char- 
lotte Mew. She has published only one book, yet that one 
small collection contains some of the finest poetry of our times. 

In 191 6, The Farmer's Bride, a paper-covered pamphlet, 
appeared in England. It contained just seventeen poems, the 
pruned fruit of many years. Saturday Market (1921) is the 
American edition of this volume with eleven poems added. 
Had Miss Mew printed nothing but the original booklet, it 
would have been sufficient to rank her among the most dis- 
tinctive and intense of living poets. Hers is the distillation, 
the essence of emotion, rather than the stirring up of pas- 
sions. Her most memorable work is in dramatic projections 
and poignant monologues (unfortunately too long to quote) 
like "The Changeling," with its fantastic pathos, and that 
powerful meditation, "Madeleine in Church." But lyrics as 
swift as "Sea Love" or as slowly hymn-like as "Beside the 
Bed," are equally sure of their place in English literature. 



Charlotte Mew 311 

They are, like all of Miss Mew's contributions, disturbing in 
their direct beauty; full of a speech that is profound without 
ever being pompous. 



BESIDE THE BED 

Someone has shut the shining eyes, straightened and folded 
The wandering hands quietly covering the unquiet 
breast : 
So, smoothed and silenced you He, like a child, not again 
to be questioned or scolded ; 
But, for you, not one of us believes that this is rest. 

Not so to close the windows down can cloud and deaden 
The blue beyond : or to screen the wavering flame sub- 
due its breath : 
Why, if I lay my cheek to your cheek, your grey lips, 
like dawn, would quiver and redden, 
Breaking into the old, odd smile at this fraud of death. 

Because all night you have not turned to us or spoken, 
It is time for you to wake; your dreams were never 
very deep: 
I, for one, have seen the thin, bright, twisted threads of 
them dimmed suddenly and broken. 
This is only a most piteous pretense of sleep! 



SEA LOVE 

Tide be runnin' the great world over: 

'Twas only last June month I mind that we 

Was thinkin' the toss and the call in the breast of the 
lover 
So everlastin' as the sea. 



312 Charlotte Mew 

Heer's the same little fishes that sputter and swim, 
Wi' the moon's old glim on the grey, wet sand; 

An' him no more to me nor me to him 
Than the wind goin' over my hand. 



Harold Monro 

Harold Monro, who describes himself as "author, publisher, 
editor and book-seller," was born in Brussels in 1879. Monro 
founded The Poetry Bookshop in London in 1912 and his 
quarterly Poetry and Drama (discontinued during the war 
and revived in 1919 as The Chapbook, a monthly) was, in a 
sense, the organ of the younger men. 

Monro's poetry is impelled by a peculiar mysticism, a mys- 
ticism that depicts the play between the worlds of reality and 
fantasy. His Strange Meetings (1917) and Children of Love 
(1915) present, with an originality rare among Monro's con- 
temporaries, the relation of man not only to the earth he rose 
from, but to the inanimate things he moves among. Even 
the most whimsical of this poet's concepts have an emotional 
intensity beneath their skilful rhythms. 



EVERY THING 

Since man has been articulate, 

Mechanical, improvidently wise, 

(Servant of Fate), 

He has not understood the little cries 

And foreign conversations of the small 

Delightful creatures that have followed him 

Not far behind; 

Has failed to hear the sympathetic call 

Of Crockery and Cutlery, those kind 

Reposeful Teraphim 



Harold Monro 313 

Of his domestic happiness; the Stool 
He sat on, or the Door he entered through : 
He has not thanked them, overbearing fool! 
What is he coming to? 

But you should listen to the talk of these. 

Honest they are, and patient they have kept; 

Served him without his Thank you or his Please . . . 

I often heard 

The gentle Bed, a sigh between each word, 

Murmuring, before I slept. 

The Candle, as I blew it, cried aloud, 

Then bowed, 

And in a smoky argument 

Into the darkness went. 

The Kettle puffed a tentacle of breath: — 
"Pooh! I have boiled his water, I don't know 
Why; and he always says I boil too slow. 
He never calls me 'Sukie, dear/ and oh, 
I wonder why I squander my desire 
Sitting submissive on his kitchen fire." 

Now the old Copper Basin suddenly 

Rattled and tumbled from the shelf, 

Bumping and crying: "I can fall by myself; 

Without a woman's hand 

To patronize and coax and flatter me, 

I understand 

The lean and poise of gravitable land." 

It gave a raucous and tumultuous shout, 

Twisted itself convulsively about, 

Rested upon the floor, and, while I stare, 

It stares and grins at me. 



3 H Harold Monro 

The old impetuous Gas above my head 
Begins irascibly to flare and fret, 
Wheezing into its epileptic jet, 
Reminding me I ought to go to bed. 

The Rafters creak; an Empty-Cupboard door 
Swings open; now a wild Plank of the floor 
Breaks from its joist, and leaps behind my foot. 
Down from the chimney, half a pound of Soot 
Tumbles and lies, and shakes itself again. 
The Putty cracks against the window-pane. 
A piece of Paper in the basket shoves 
Another piece, and toward the bottom moves. 
My independent Pencil, while I write, 
Breaks at the point: the ruminating Clock 
Stirs all its body and begins to rock, 
Warning the waiting presence of the Night, 
Strikes the dead hour, and tumbles to the plain 
Ticking of ordinary work again. 

You do well to remind me, and I praise 
Your strangely individual foreign ways. 
You call me from myself to recognize 
Companionship in your unselfish eyes. 
I want your dear acquaintances, although 
I pass you arrogantly over, throw 
Your lovely sounds, and squander them along 
My busy days. I'll do you no more wrong. 

Purr for me, Sukie, like a faithful cat. 

You, my well trampled Boots, and you, my Hat, 

Remain my friends: I feel, though I don't speak, 

Your touch grow kindlier from week to week. 

It well becomes our mutual happiness 

To go toward the same end more or less. 



Harold Monro 31^ 

There is not much dissimilarity, 

Not much to choose, I know it well, in fine, 

Between the purposes of you and me, 

And your eventual Rubbish Heap, and mine. 



THE NIGHTINGALE NEAR THE HOUSE 

Here is the soundless cypress on the lawn: 
It listens, listens. Taller trees beyond 
Listen. The moon at the unruffled pond 
Stares. And you sing, you sing. 

That star-enchanted song falls through the air 
From lawn to lawn down terraces of sound, 
Darts in white arrows on the shadowed ground ; 
And all the night you sing. 

My dreams are flowers to which you are a bee 
As all night long I listen, and my brain 
Receives your song; then loses it again 
In moonlight on the lawn. 

Now is your voice a marble high and white, 
Then like a mist on fields of paradise, 
Now is a raging fire, then is like ice, 
Then breaks, and it is dawn. 



Alfred Noyes 



Alfred Noyes was born at Staffordshire, September 16, 1880, 
and educated at Exeter College, Oxford. He is one of the 
few contemporary poets who have been fortunate enough to 



3 16 Alfred Noyes 

write a kind of poetry that is not only saleable but popular 
with many classes of people. 

His first book, The Loom of Years (1902), was published 
when he was only 22 years old, and Poems (1904) intensified 
the promise of his first publication. Unfortunately, Noyes has 
not developed his gifts as deeply as his admirers have hoped. 
His poetry, extremely straightforward and rhythmical, has 
often degenerated into cheap sentimentalities; it has fre- 
quently attempted to express profundities far beyond Noyes's 
power. 

What is most appealing about his best verse is its ease and 
heartiness; this singer's gift lies in the almost personal bond 
established between the poe* and his public. People have such 
a good time reading his vivacious lines because Noyes had 
such a good time writing them. Noyes's own relish filled and 
quickened glees and catches like Forty Singing Seamen (1907), 
the lusty choruses in Tales of the Mermaid Tavern (1913), 
and the genuinely inspired nonsense of the earlier Forest of 
Wild Thyme (1905). 

His eight volumes were assembled in 1913 and published in 
two books of Collected Poems (Frederick A. Stokes Company). 



THE BARREL-ORGAN 

There's a barrel-organ carolling across a golden street 

In the City as the sun sinks low; 
And the music's not immortal; but the world has made 
it sweet 
And fulfilled it with the sunset glow; 
And it pulses through the pleasures of the City and the 
pain 
That surround the singing organ like a large eternal 
light; 
And they've given it a glory and a part to play again 
In the Symphony that rules the day and night. 



Alfred Noyes 317 

And now it's marching onward through the realms of 
old romance, 

And trolling out a fond familiar tune, 
And now it's roaring cannon down to fight the King of 
France, 

And now it's prattling softly to the moon. 
And all around the organ there's a sea without a shore 

Of human joys and wonders and regrets; 
To remember and to recompense the music evermore 

For what the cold machinery forgets . . . 

Yes; as the music changes, 

Like a prismatic glass, 
It takes the light and ranges 

Through all the moods that pass; 
Dissects the common carnival 

Of passions and regrets, 
And gives the world a glimpse of all 

The colours it forgets. 

And there La Traviata sighs 

Another sadder song; 
And there 77 Trovatore cries 

A tale of deeper wrong; 
And bolder knights to battle go 

With sword and shield and lance, 
Than ever here on earth below 

Have whirled into — a dance! — 

Go down to Kew in lilac-time, in lilac-time, in lilac-time ; 
Go down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn't far from 
London!) 
And you shall wander hand in hand with love in sum- 
mer's wonderland ; 
Go down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn't far from 
London!) 



3 18 Alfred Noyes 

The cherry-trees are seas of bloom and soft perfume and 
sweet perfume, 
The cherry-trees are seas of bloom (and oh, so near 
to London!) 
And there they say, when dawn is high and all the 
world's a blaze of sky 
The cuckoo, though he's very shy, will sing a song for 
London. 

The nightingale is rather rare and yet they say you'll 
hear him there 
At Kew, at Kew in lilac-time (and oh, so near to 
London!) 
The linnet and the throstle, too, and after dark the long 
halloo 
And golden-eyed tu-whit, tu-whoo of owls that ogle 
London. 

For Noah hardly knew a bird of any kind that isn't heard 
At Kew, at Kew in lilac-time (and oh, so near to 
London ! ) 
And when the rose begins to pout and all the chestnut 
spires are out 
You'll hear the rest, without a doubt, all chorusing 
for London: — 

Come down to Kew in lilac-time, in lilac-time, in lilac- 
time; 
Come down to Kew in lilac-time (it isnt far from 
London!) 
And you shall wander hand in hand with love in sum- 
mer s wonderland; 
Come down to Kew in lilac-time (it isnt far from 
London!) 



Alfred Noyes 319 

And then the troubadour begins to thrill the golden 

street, 
In the City as the sun sinks low; 
And in all the gaudy busses there are scores of weary 

feet 
Marking time, sweet time, with a dull mechanic beat, 
And a thousand hearts are plunging to a love they'll never 

meet, 
Through the meadows of the sunset, through the poppies 

and the wheat, 
In the land where the dead dreams go. 

Verdi, Verdi, when you wrote // Trovatore did you 
dream 
Of the City when the sun sinks low, 
Of the organ and the monkey and the many-coloured 

stream 
On the Piccadilly pavement, of the myriad eyes that seem 
To be litten for a moment with a wild Italian gleam 
As A che la morte parodies the world's eternal theme 
And pulses with the sunset-glow ? 

There's a thief, perhaps, that listens with a face of frozen 

stone 
In the City as the sun sinks low ; 
There's a portly man of business with a balance of his 

own, 
There's a clerk and there's a butcher of a soft reposeful 

tone, 
And they're all of them returning to the heavens they 

have known : 
They are crammed and jammed in busses and — they're 

each of them alone 
In the land w r here the dead dreams go. 



320 Alfred Noyes 

There's a labourer that listens to the voices of the dead 

In the City as the sun sinks low; 
And his hand begins to tremble and his face is rather red 
As he sees a loafer watching him and — there he turns his 

head 
And stares into the sunset where his April love is fled, 
For he hears her softly singing and his lonely soul is led 

Through the land where the dead dreams go . . . 

There's a barrel-organ carolling across a golden street 

In the City as the sun sinks low; 
Though the music's only Verdi there's a world to make it 

sweet 
Just as yonder yellow sunset where the earth and heaven 

meet 
Mellows all the sooty City! Hark, a hundred thousand 

feet 
Are marching on to glory through the poppies and the 

wheat 
In the land where the dead dreams go. 

So it's Jeremiah, Jeremiah, 

What have you to say 
When you meet the garland girls 

Tripping on their way? 
All around my gala hat 

I wear a wreath of roses 
(A long and lonely year it is 

I've waited for the May!) 
If any one should ask you, 

The reason why I wear it is — 
My own love, my true love is coming 
home today. 



Alfred Noyes 321 

And it's buy a bunch of violets for the lady 

{It's lilac-time in London; it's lilac-time in London!) 

Buy a bunch of violets for the lady; 
While the sky burns blue above: 

On the other side the street you'll find it shady 

{It's lilac-time in London; it's lilac-time in London!) 

But buy a bunch of violets for the lady, 
And tell her she's your own true love. 

There's a barrel-organ carolling across a golden street 

In the City as the sun sinks glittering and slow; 
And the music's not immortal; but the world has made 

it sweet 
And enriched it with the harmonies that make a song 

complete 
In the deeper heavens of music where the night and morn- 
ing meet, 
As it dies into the sunset glow; 
And it pulses through the pleasures of the City and the 
pain 
That surround the singing organ like a large eternal 
light, 
And they've given it a glory and a part to play again 
In the Symphony that rules the day and night. 

And there, as the music changes, 

The song runs round again; 
Once more it turns and ranges 

Through all its joy and pain: 
Dissects the common carnival 

Of passions and regrets; 
And the wheeling world remembers all 

The wheeling song forgets. 



322 Alfred Noyes 

Come down to Kew in lilac-time, in lilac-time, in lilac- 
time; 
Come down to Kew in lilac-time {it isnt far from 
London!) 
And you shall wander hand in hand with Love in sum- 
mer s wonderland, 
Come down to Kew in lilac-time {it isnt far from 
London!) 



EPILOGUE 

{From "The Flower of Old Japan') 

Carol, every violet has 
Heaven for a looking-glass! 

Every little valley lies 
Under many-clouded skies; 
Every little cottage stands 
Girt about with boundless lands. 
Every little glimmering pond 
Claims the mighty shores beyond — 
Shores no seaman ever hailed, 
Seas no ship has ever sailed. 

All the shores when day is done 
Fade into the setting sun, 
So the story tries to teach 
More than can be told in speech. 

Beauty is a fading flower, 
Truth is but a wizards tower, 
Where a solemn death-bell tolls, 
And a forest round it rolls. 



Alfred Noyes 323 

We have come by curious ways 
To the light that holds the days; 
We have sought in haunts of fear 
For that all-enfolding sphere: 
And lo ! it was not far, but near. 
We have found, O foolish-fond, 
The shore that has no shore beyond. 

Deep in every heart it lies 
With its untranscended skies; 
For what heaven should bend above 
Hearts that own the heaven of love? 

Carol, Carol, we have come 
Back to heaven, back to home. 



Padraic Colum 

Padraic Colum was born at Longford, Ireland (in the same 
county as Oliver Goldsmith), December 8, 1881, and was edu- 
cated at the local schools. At 20 he was a member of a group 
that created the Irish National Theatre, afterwards called The 
Abbey Theatre. He has lived in America since 1914. 

Colum began as a dramatist with Broken Soil (1904), The 
Land (1905), Thomas Muskerry (1910), and this early 
dramatic influence has colored much of his work, his best 
poetry being in the form of dramatic lyrics. Wild Earth, his 
most notable collection of verse, first appeared in 1909, and an 
amplified edition of it was published in America in 1916. 



THE PLOUGHER 

Sunset and silence! A man: around him earth savage, 

earth broken; 
Beside him two horses — a plough! 



324 Padraic Colum 

Earth savage, earth broken, the brutes, the dawn man 

there in the sunset, 
And the Plough that is twin to the Sword, that is founder 

of cities! 

"Brute-tamer, plough-maker, earth-breaker! Can'st hear? 

There are ages between us. 
"Is it praying you are as you stand there alone in the 

sunset ? 

"Surely our sky-born gods can be naught to you, earth 

child and earth master? 
"Surely your thoughts are of Pan, or of Wotan, or 

Dana? 

"Yet, why give thought to the gods? Has Pan led your 

brutes where they stumble? 
"Has Dana numbed pain of the child-bed, or Wotan put 

hands to your plough? 

"What matter your foolish reply! O, man, standing 

lone and bowed earthward, 
"Your task is a day near its close. Give thanks to the 

night-giving God." 



Slowly the darkness falls, the broken lands blend with 

the savage; 
The brute-tamer stands by the brutes, a head's breadth 

only above them. 

A head's breadth? Ay, but therein is hell's depth, and 

the height up to heaven, 
And the thrones of the gods and their halls, their chariots, 

purples, and splendors. 



Joseph Campbell 325 

(Seosamh MacCathmhaoil) 



Joseph Campbell was born in Belfast in 1881, and is not 
only a poet but an artist; he made all the illustrations for The 
Rushlight (1906), a volume of his own poems. Writing under 
the Gaelic form of his name, he has published half a dozen 
books of verse, the most striking of which is The Mountainy 
Singer, first published in Dublin in 1909. 



THE OLD WOMAN 

As a white candle 

In a holy place, 
So is the beauty 

Of an aged face. 

As the spent radiance 
Of the winter sun, 

So is a woman 

With her travail done. 

Her brood gone from her, 
And her thoughts as still 

As the waters 

Under a ruined mill. 



Lascelles Abercrombie 

Lascelles Abercrombie was born in 1881 and educated at 
Victoria University, Manchester. Like Masefield, he gained 
his reputation rapidly. Totally unknown until 1909, upon the 
publication of Interludes and Poems, he was recognized as 
one of the greatest metaphysical poets of his period. Emblems 
of Love (1912), the ripest collection of his blank verse dia- 
logues, justified the enthusiasm of his admirers. 



326 Lascelles Abercrombie 

Many of Abercrombie's poems, the best of which are too 
long to quote, are founded on scriptural themes, but it is the 
undercurrent rather than the surface of his verse which moves 
with a strong religious conviction. Abercrombie's images are 
daring and brilliant; his lines, sometimes too closely packed, 
glow with an intensity that is warmly spiritual and fervently 
human. 



FROM "VASHTI" 

What thing shall be held up to woman's beauty ? 
Where are the bounds of it? Yea, what is all 
The world, but an awning scaffolded amid 
The waste perilous Eternity, to lodge 
This Heaven-wander'd princess, woman's beauty? 
The East and West kneel down to thee, the North 
And South; and all for thee their shoulders bear 
The load of fourfold space. As yellow morn 
Runs on the slippery waves of the spread sea, 
Thy feet are on the griefs and joys of men 
That sheen to be thy causey. Out of tears 
Indeed, and blitheness, murder and lust and love, 
Whatever has been passionate in clay, 
Thy flesh was tempered. Behold in thy body 
The yearnings of all men measured and told, 
Insatiate endless agonies of desire 
Given thy flesh, the meaning of thy shape! 
What beauty is there, but thou makest it? 
How is earth good to look on, woods and fields, 
The season's garden, and the courageous hills, 
All this green raft of earth moored in the seas? 
The manner of the sun to ride the air, 
The stars God has imagined for the night? 
What's this behind them, that we cannot near, 



Lascelles Abercrombie 327 

Secret still on the point of being blabbed, 

The ghost in the world that flies from being named? 

Where do they get their beauty from, all these? 

They do but glaze a lantern lit for man, 

And woman's beauty is the flame therein. 



James Stephens 

This unique personality was born in Dublin in February, 
1882. Stephens was discovered in an office and saved from 
clerical slavery by George Russell ("A. E."). Always a poet, 
Stephens's most poetic moments are in his highly-colored prose. 
And yet, although the finest of his novels, The Crock of Gold 
(1912), contains more wild phantasy and quaint imagery than 
all his volumes of verse, his Insurrections (1909) and The Hill 
of Vision (1912) reveal a rebellious spirit that is at once 
hotly ironic and coolly whimsical. 

Stephens's outstanding characteristic is his delightful blend 
of incongruities — he combines in his verse the grotesque, the 
buoyant and the profound. 



THE SHELL 

And then I pressed the shell 

Close to my ear 

And listened well, 

And straightway like a bell 

Came low and clear 

The slow, sad murmur of the distant seas, 

Whipped by an icy breeze 

Upon a shore 

Wind-swept and desolate. 

It w T as a sunless strand that never bore 

The footprint of a man, 

Nor felt the weight 



328 James Stephens 

Since time began 

Of any human quality or stir 

Save what the dreary winds and waves incur. 

And in the hush of waters was the sound 

Of pebbles rolling round, 

For ever rolling with a hollow sound. 

And bubbling sea-weeds as the waters go, 

Swish to and fro 

Their long, cold tentacles of slimy grey. 

There was no day, 

Nor ever came a night 

Setting the stars alight 

To wonder at the moon: 

Was twilight only and the frightened croon, 

Smitten to whimpers, of the dreary wind 

And waves that journeyed blind — 

And then I loosed my ear. ... O, it was sweet 

To hear a cart go jolting down the street. 



WHAT TOMAS AN BUILE SAID IN A PUB 

I saw God. Do you doubt it? 

Do you dare to doubt it? 
I saw the Almighty Man. His hand 
Was resting on a mountain, and 
He looked upon the World and all about it: 
I saw him plainer than you see me now, 

You mustn't doubt it. 

He was not satisfied; 

His look was all dissatisfied. 
His beard swung on a wind far out of sight 
Behind the world's curve, and there was light 



James Stephens 329 

Most fearful from His forehead, and He sighed, 
"That star went always wrong, and from the start 
I was dissatisfied." 

He lifted up His hand — 

I say He heaved a dreadful hand 
Over the spinning Earth. Then I said, "Stay, 
You must not strike it, God; I'm in the way; 
And I will never move from where I stand." 
He said, "Dear child, I feared that you were dead," 

And stayed His hand. 



John Drinkwater 

Primarily a poetic dramatist, John Drinkwater, born in 
1882, is best known as the author of Abraham Lincoln — A Play 
(1919) founded on Lord Charnwood's masterly and analytical 
biography. He has published several volumes of poems, most 
of them meditative in mood. 

The best of his verses have been collected in Poems, 1908- 
19, and the two here reprinted are used by special arrange- 
ment with Houghton Mifflin Company, the authorized pub- 
lishers. 

RECIPROCITY 

I do not think that skies and meadows are 
Moral, or that the fixture of a star 
Comes of a quiet spirit, or that trees 
Have wisdom in their windless silences. 
Yet these are things invested in my mood 
With constancy, and peace, and fortitude; 
That in my troubled season I can cry 
Upon the wide composure of the sky, 
And envy fields, and wish that I might be 
As little daunted as a star or tree. 



330 John Drinkwater 



A TOWN WINDOW 

Beyond my window in the night 
Is but a drab inglorious street, 

Yet there the frost and clean starlight 
As over Warwick woods are sweet. 

Under the grey drift of the town 
The crocus works among the mould 

As eagerly as those that crown 

The Warwick spring in flame and gold. 

And when the tramway down the hill 
Across the cobbles moans and rings, 

There is about my window-sill 

The tumult of a thousand wings. 



/. C. Squire 

Jack Collings Squire was born April 2, 1883, at Plymouth, 
of Devonian ancestry. He was educated at Blundell's and 
Cambridge University, and became known first as a remark- 
ably adroit parodist. His Imaginary Speeches (1912) and 
Tricks of the Trade (1917) are amusing parodies and, what 
is more, excellent criticism. He edited The New Statesman 
for a while and founded The London Mercury (a monthly of 
which he is editor) in November, 1919. Under the pseudonym 
"Solomon Eagle" he wrote a page of literary criticism every 
week for six years, many of these papers being collected in 
his volume, Books in General (1919). 

His original poetry is intellectual but simple, sometimes 
metaphysical and always interesting technically in its variable 
rhythms. A collection of his best verse up to 1919 was pub- 
lished under the title, Poems: First Series. Another volume, 
Poems: Second Series appeared during Squire's visit to Amer- 
ica in the fall of 1921. 



J. C. Squire 331 



A HOUSE 

Now very quietly, and rather mournfully, 

In clouds of hyacinths the sun retires, 
And all the stubble-fields that were so warm to him 

Keep but in memory their borrowed fires. 

And I, the traveller, break, still unsatisfied, 
From that faint exquisite celestial strand, 

And turn and see again the only dwelling-place 
In this wide wilderness of darkening land. 

The house, that house, O now what change has come to it. 

Its crude red-brick faqade, its roof of slate; 
What imperceptible swift hand has given it 

A new, a wonderful, a queenly state? 

No hand has altered it, that parallelogram, 

So inharmonious, so ill-arranged; 
That hard blue roof in shape and colour's what it was; 

No, it is not that any line has changed. 

Only that loneliness is now accentuate 

And, as the dusk unveils the heaven's deep cave, 

This small world's feebleness fills me with awe again, 
And all men's energies seem very brave. 

And this mean edifice, which some dull architect 
Built for an ignorant earth-turning hind, 

Takes on the quality of that magnificent 
Unshakable dauntlessness of human kind. 

Darkness and stars will come, and long the night will be, 



Yet imperturbable that house will rest, 
Avoiding gallantly the stars' chill scrutiny, 
Ignoring secrets in the midnight's breast. 



332 7. C. Squire 

Thunders may shudder it, and winds demoniac 
May howl their menaces, and hail descend : 

Yet it will bear with them, serenely, steadfastly, 
Not even scornfully, and wait the end. 

And all a universe of nameless messengers 
From unknown distances may whisper fear, 

And it will imitate immortal permanence, 

And stare and stare ahead and scarcely hear. 

It stood there yesterday; it will tomorrow, too, 
When there is none to watch, no alien eyes 

To watch its ugliness assume a majesty 
From this great solitude of evening skies. 

So lone, so very small, with worlds and worlds around, 
While life remains to it prepared to outface 

Whatever awful unconjectured mysteries 
May hide and wait for it in time and space. 



Anna Wickham 

Anna Wickham was born in Wimbledon, Surrey, in 1883. 
She went to Australia at six, returned when she was twenty- 
one, studied for Opera in Paris with De Reszke and suddenly, 
after a few years of marriage, became a poet. In a burst of 
creative energy she wrote nine hundred poems in four years. 

Her two first books were republished in America in one 
volume, The Contemplative Quarry (1921). The most casual 
reading of Anna Wickham's work reveals the strength of her 
candor. The poems could scarcely be put in the category of 
"charming" verse; they are astringent and sometimes harsh; 
gnarled frequently by their own changes of mood. Her lines 
present the picture of woman struggling between dreams and 
domesticity; they are acutely sensitive, restless, analytical. 
The very tone of her poetry reflects the disturbed music and 
the nervous intensity of her age. 



Anna Wickham 333 

ENVOI 

God, thou great symmetry, 

Who put a biting lust in me 

From whence my sorrows spring, 

For all the frittered days 

That I have spent in shapeless ways, 

Give me one perfect thing. 



DOMESTIC ECONOMY 

I will have few cooking-pots, 

They shall be bright; 

They shall reflect to blinding 

God's straight light. 

I will have four garments, 

They shall be clean; 

My service shall be good, 

Though my diet be mean. 

Then I shall have excess to give to the poor, 

And right to counsel beggars at my door. 



THE SINGER 

If I had peace to sit and sing, 
Then I could make a lovely thing; 
But I am stung with goads and whips, 
So I build songs like iron ships. 



Let it be something for my song, 
If it is sometimes swift and strong. 



334 James Elroy Flecker 

Another poet whose early death was a blow to English 
literature, James Elroy Flecker, was born in London, Novem- 
ber 5, 1884. Possibly due to his low vitality, Flecker at first 
found little to interest him but a classical reaction against 
realism in verse, a delight in verbal craftsmanship, and a 
passion for technical perfection. 

The advent of the war began to make Fleckers verse more 
personal and romantic. The tuberculosis that finally killed 
him at Davos Platz, Switzerland, January 3, 1915, forced him 
from an Olympian disinterest to a deep concern with life and 
death. 

His two colorful volumes are The Golden Journey to 
Samarkand (1913) and The Old Ships (1915). 



STILLNESS 

When the words rustle no more, 

And the last work's done, 
When the bolt lies deep in the door, 

And Fire, our Sun, 
Falls on the dark-laned meadows of the floor; 

When from the clock's last chime to the next chime 

Silence beats his drum, 
And Space with gaunt grey eyes and her brother Time 

Wheeling and whispering come, 
She with the mould of form and he with the loom of 
rhyme : 

Then twittering out in the night my thought-birds flee, 

I am emptied of all my dreams: 
I only hear Earth turning, only see 

Ether's long bankless streams, 
And only know I should drown if you laid not your hand 
on me. 



D. H. Lawrence 335 

David Herbert Lawrence, born in 1885, is one of the most 
psychologically intense of the modern poets. This intensity, 
ranging from a febrile morbidity to an exalted and almost 
frenzied mysticism, is seen even in his prose works — particu- 
larly in his short stories, The Prussian Officer (1917) and his 
analytical Sons and Lovers (1913). 

As a poet he is often caught in the net of his own emo- 
tions; his passion thickens his utterance and distorts his 
rhythms, which sometimes seem purposely harsh and bitter- 
flavored. But within his range he is as powerful as he is 
poignant. His most notable volumes of poetry are Amores 
(1916), Look! We Have Come Through! (1918), and New 
Poems (1920). 



PIANO 

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me; 

Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see 

A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the 

tingling strings 
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who 

smiles as she sings. 

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song 
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong 
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside 
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our 
guide. 

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour 
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour 
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast 
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child 
for the past. 



336 D. H. Lawrence 



FORSAKEN AND ^FORLORN 

The house is silent, it is late at night, I am alone. 
From the balcony 
I can hear the Isar moan, 
Can see the white 
Rift of the river eerily, between the pines, under a sky 
of stone. 

Some fireflies drift through the middle air 
Tinily. 
I wonder where 
Ends this darkness that annihilates me ? 



John Freeman 

John Freeman, born in 1885, has published several volumes 
of pleasantly descriptive verse. The two most distinctive are 
Stone Trees (1916) and Memories of Childhood (1919). 

STONE TREES 

Last night a sword-light in the sky 
Flashed a swift terror on the dark. 
In that sharp light the fields did lie 
Naked and stone-like; each tree stood 
Like a tranced woman, bound and stark. 

Far off the wood 
With darkness ridged the riven dark. 

And cows astonished stared with fear, 
And sheep crept to the knees of cows, 
And conies to their burrows slid, 
And rooks were still in rigid boughs, 



John Freeman 337 

And all things else were still or hid. 

From all the wood 
Came but the owl's hoot, ghostly, clear. 

In that cold trance the earth was held 
It seemed an age, or time was nought. 
Sure never from that stone-like field 
Sprang golden corn, nor from those chill 
Grey granite trees was music wrought. 

In all the wood 
Even the tall poplar hung stone still. 

It seemed an age, or time was none . . . 
Slowly the earth heaved out of sleep 
And shivered, and the trees of stone 
Bent and sighed in the gusty wind, 
And rain swept as birds flocking sweep. 

Far off the wood 
Rolled the slow thunders on the wind. 

From all the wood came no brave bird, 

No song broke through the close-faH'n night, 

Nor any sound from cowering herd : 

Only a dog's long lonely howl 

When from the window poured pale light. 

And from the wood 
The hoot came ghostly of the owl. 



Shane Leslie 

Shane Leslie, the only surviving son of Sir John Leslie, was 
born at Swan Park, Monaghan, Ireland, in 1885 and was edu- 
cated at Eton and the University of Paris. He worked for a 
time among the Irish poor and was deeply interested in the 
Celtic revival. 



338 



Shane Leslie 



Leslie has been editor of The Dublin Review since 1916. 
He is the author of several volumes on Irish political matters 
as well as The End of a Chapter and Verses in Peace and 
War. 



FLEET STREET 

I never see the newsboys run 
Amid the whirling street, 
With swift untiring feet, 

To cry the latest venture done, 

But I expect one day to hear 
Them cry the crack of doom 
And risings from the tomb, 

With great Archangel Michael near; 

And see them running from the Fleet 
As messengers of God, 
With Heaven's tidings shod 

About their brave unwearied feet. 



Siegfried Sassoon 



Siegfried (Loraine) Sassoon, the poet whom Masefield hailed 
as "one of England's most brilliant rising stars," was born 
September 8, 1886. He was educated at Marlborough and 
Clare College, Cambridge, and was a captain in the Royal 
Welsh Fusiliers. He fought three times in France, once in 
Palestine, winning the Military Cross for bringing in wounded 
on the battlefield. 

His poetry divides itself sharply in two moods — the lyric 
and the ironic. His early lilting poems were without signifi- 
cance or individuality. But with The Old Huntsman (1917) 
Sassoon found his own idiom, and became one of the leading 
younger poets upon the appearance of this striking volume. 
The first poem, a long monologue evidently inspired by Mase- 



Siegfried Sassoon 339 

field, gave little evidence of what was to come. Immediately 
following it, however, came a series of war poems, undis- 
guised in their tragedy and bitterness. Every line of these 
quivering stanzas bore the mark of a sensitive and outraged 
nature ; there was scarcely a phrase that did not protest against 
the "glorification" and false glamour of war. 

Counter- Attack appeared in 1918. In this volume Sassoon 
turned entirely from an ordered loveliness to the gigantic bru- 
tality of war. At heart a lyric idealist, the bloody years in- 
tensified and twisted his tenderness till what was stubborn 
and satiric in him forced its way to the top. In Counter-At- 
tack, Sassoon found his angry outlet. Most of these poems 
are choked with passion; many of them are torn out, roots 
and all, from the very core of an intense conviction; they 
rush on, not so much because of the poet's art but almost in 
spite of it. 

Early in 1920 Sassoon visited America. At the same time 
he brought out his Picture Show (1920), a vigorous answer to 
those who feared that Sassoon had "written himself out" or 
had begun to burn away in his own fire. 

Sassoon's three volumes are the most vital and unsparing 
records of the war we have had. They synthesize in poetry 
what Barbusse's Under Fire spreads out in panoramic prose. 



DREAMERS 

Soldiers are citizens of death's gray land, 

Drawing no dividend from time's tomorrows. 
In the great hour of destiny they stand, 

Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows. 
Soldiers are sworn to action ; they must win 

Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives. 
Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin 

They think of firelit homes, clean beds, and wives. 

I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats, 
And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain, 



34° Siegfried Sassoon 

Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats, 
And mocked by hopeless longing to regain 

Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats, 
And going to the office in the train. 



THE REAR-GUARD 

Groping along the tunnel, step by step, 

He winked his prying torch with patching glare 

From side to side, and sniffed the unwholesome air. 

Tins, boxes, bottles, shapes too vague to know, 

A mirror smashed, the mattress from a bed; 

And he, exploring fifty feet below 

The rosy gloom of battle overhead. 

Tripping, he grabbed the wall ; saw someone lie 

Humped at his feet, half-hidden by a rug, 

And stooped to give the sleeper's arm a tug. 

"I'm looking for headquarters." No reply. 

"God blast your neck!" (For days he'd had no sleep.) 

"Get up and guide me through this stinking place." 

Savage, he kicked a soft, unanswering heap, 

And flashed his beam across the livid face 

Terribly glaring up, whose eyes yet wore 

Agony dying hard ten days before ; 

And fists of fingers clutched a blackening wound. 

Alone he staggered on until he found 

Dawn's ghost that filtered down a shafted stair 

To the dazed, muttering creatures underground 

Who hear the boom of shells in muffled sound. 

At last, with sweat of horror in his hair, 

He climbed through darkness to the twilight air, 

Unloading hell behind him step by step. 



Siegfried Sassoon 341 



AFTERMATH 

Have you forgotten yet? . . . 

For the world's events have rumbled on since those gagged 

days, 
Like traffic checked awhile at the crossing of city ways: 
And the haunted gap in your mind has rilled with 

thoughts that flow 
Like clouds in the lit heavens of life; and you're a man 

reprieved to go, 
Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare. 
But the past is just the same, — and Wars a bloody 

game. . . . 
Have you forgotten yet? . . . 
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you 11 

never forget. 

Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at 

Mametz, — ■ 
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled 

sandbags on parapets? 
Do you remember the rats; and the stench 
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench, — 
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless 

rain? 
Do you ever stop and ask, "Is it all going to happen 

again ?" 

Do you remember that hour of din before the attack, — 
And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook 

you then 
As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your 

men? 
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back 



342 Siegfried Sassoon 

With dying eyes and lolling heads, those ashen-grey 
Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay? 

Have you forgotten yetf . . . 

Look up, end swear by the green of the Spring thai you 11 
never forget. 



Rupert Brooke 

Possibly the most famous of the Georgians, Rupert 
(Chawner) Brooke, was born at Rugby in August, 1887, his 
father being assistant master at the school. As a youth, 
Brooke was keenly interested in all forms of athletics, play- 
ing cricket, football, tennis, and swimming as well as most 
professionals. He was six feet tall, his finely molded head 
topped with a crown of loose hair of lively brown; "a golden 
/oung Apollo," said Edward Thomas. Another friend of his 
wrote, "To look at, he was part of the youth of the world." 

At the very outbreak of the war, Brooke enlisted, fired 
with an idealism that conquered his irony. After seeing serv- 
ice in Belgium, 1914, he spent the following winter in a 
training-camp in Dorsetshire and sailed with the British 
Mediterranean Expeditionary Force in February, 191 5, to take 
part in the unfortunate Dardanelles Campaign. 

Brooke never reached his destination. He died of blood- 
poison at Skyros, April 23, 1915. His early death was one 
of England's great literary losses. 

Brooke's sonnet-sequence, 191 4 (from which "The Soldier" 
is taken), which, with prophetic irony, appeared a few weeks 
before his death, contains the accents of immortality. And 
"The Old Vicarage, Grantchester" (unfortunately too long 
to reprint in this volume), is fully as characteristic of the 
lighter and more playful side of Brooke's temperament. Both 
these phases are combined in "The Great Lover," of which 
Lascelles Abercrombie has written, "It is life he loves, and 
not in any abstract sense, but all the infinite little familiar 
details of life, remembered and catalogued with delightful 
zest." 



Rupert Brooke 343 

SONNET x 

Oh! Death will find me, long before I tire 
Of watching you ; and swing me suddenly 

Into the shade and loneliness and mire 

Of the last land! There, waiting patiently, 

One day, I think, I'll feel a cool wind blowing, 

See a slow light across the Stygian tide, 
And hear the Dead about me stir, unknowing, 

And tremble. And I shall know that you have died. 

And watch you, a broad-browed and smiling dream, 
Pass, light as ever, through the lightless host, 

Quietly ponder, start, and sway, and gleam — 
Most individual and bewildering ghost! — 

And turn, and toss your brown delightful head 

Amusedly, among the ancient Dead. 



THE GREAT LOVER 1 

I have been so great a lover: filled my days 
So proudly with the splendour of Love's praise, 
The pain, the calm, the astonishment, 
Desire illimitable, and still content, 
And all dear names men use, to cheat despair, 
For the perplexed and viewless streams that bear 
Our hearts at random down the dark of life. 
Now, ere the unthinking silence on that strife 

1 From The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke. Copyright 
I 9 I 5> by John Lane Company and reprinted by permission. 



344 Rupert Brooke 

Steals down, I would cheat drowsy Death so far, 

My night shall be remembered for a star 

That outshone all the suns of all men's days. 

Shall I not crown them with immortal praise 

Whom I have loved, who have given me, dared with me 

High secrets, and in darkness knelt to see 

The inenarrable godhead of delight? 

Love is a flame; — we have beaconed the world's night. 

A city: — and we have built it, these and I. 

An emperor: — we have taught the world to die. 

So, for their sakes I loved, ere I go hence, 

And the high cause of Love's magnificence, 

And to keep loyalties young, I'll write those names 

Golden for ever, eagles, crying flames, 

And set them as a banner, that men may know, 

To dare the generations, burn, and blow 

Out on the wind of Time, shining and streaming. . . . 

These I have loved: 

White plates and cups, clean-gleaming, 
Ringed with blue lines ; and feathery, faery dust ; 
Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light; the strong crust 
Of friendly bread; and many-tasting food; 
Rainbows ; and the blue bitter smoke of wood ; 
And radiant raindrops couching in cool flowers; 
And flowers themselves, that sway through sunny hours, 
Dreaming of moths that drink them under the moon; 
Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon 
Smooth away trouble; and the rough male kiss 
Of blankets; grainy wood; live hair that is 
Shining and free; blue-massing clouds; the keen 
Unpassioned beauty of a great machine; 
The benison of hot water ; furs to touch ; 
The good smell of old clothes; and other such — 



Rupert Brooke 345 

The comfortable smell of friendly ringers, 
Hair's fragrance, and the musty reek that lingers 
About dead leaves and last year's ferns. . . . 

Dear names, 
And thousand others throng to me! Royal flames; 
Sweet water's dimpling laugh from tap or spring; 
Holes in the ground; and voices that do sing: 
Voices in laughter, too; and body's pain, 
Soon turned to peace; and the deep-panting train; 
Firm sands; the little dulling edge of foam 
That browns and dwindles as the wave goes home; 
And washen stones, gay for an hour; the cold 
Graveness of iron; moist black earthen mould; 
Sleep; and high places; footprints in the dew; 
And oaks; and brown horse-chestnuts, glossy-new; 
And new-peeled sticks; and shining pools on grass; — 
All these have been my loves. And these shall pass. 
Whatever passes not, in the great hour, 
Nor all my passion, all my prayers, have power 
To hold them with me through the gate of Death. 
They'll play deserter, turn with the traitor breath, 
Break the high bond we made, and sell Love's trust 
And sacramented covenant to the dust. 
— Oh, never a doubt but, somewhere, I shall wake, 
And give what's left of love again, and make 
New friends, now strangers. . . . 

But the best I've known, 
Stays here, and changes, breaks, grows old, is blown 
About the winds of the world, and fades from brains 
Of living men, and dies. 

Nothing remains. 

O dear my loves, O faithless, once again 
This one last gift I give: that after men 



346 Rupert Brooke 

Shall know, and later lovers, far-removed 

Praise you, "All these were lovely''; say, "He loved/' 



THE SOLDIER 1 

If I should die, think only this of me; 

That there's some corner of a foreign field 
That is for ever England. There shall be 

In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; 
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, 

Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, 
A body of England's, breathing English air, 

Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. 

And think, this heart, all evil shed away, 
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less 

Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England 
given ; 
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; 
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, 
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven. 



Joseph Plunkett 

Joseph Plunkett was born in Ireland in 1887 and devoted 
himself to the cause that has compelled so many martyrs. 
He gave all his hours and finally his life in an effort to es- 
tablish the freedom of his country. He was one of the lead- 
ers of that group of Nationalists which included MacDonagh 
and Padraic Pearse. 

After the Easter Week uprising in Dublin in 1916, Plunkett 
and his compatriots were arrested by the British Government 
and executed. 

1 From The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke. Copyright, 
I 9 I 5> by John Lane Company and reprinted by permission. 



Joseph Plunkett 347 

I SEE HIS BLOOD UPON THE ROSE 

I see His blood upon the rose 
And in the stars the glory of His eyes, 
His body gleams amid eternal snows, 
His tears fall from the skies. 

I see His face in every flower; 

The thunder and the singing of the birds 

Are but His voice — and carven by His power, 

Rocks are His written words. 

All pathways by His feet are worn, 
His strong heart stirs the ever-beating sea, 
His crown of thorns is twined with every thorn, 
His cross is every tree. 



F. W. Harvey 

Harvey was a lance-corporal in the English army and was 
in the German prison camp at Giitersloh when he wrote The 
Bugler, one of the isolated great poems written during the 
war. Much of his other verse is haphazard and journalistic, 
although Gloucestershire Friends contains several lines that 
glow with the colors of poetry. 

THE BUGLER 

God dreamed a man; 

Then, having firmly shut 

Life like a precious metal in his fist 

Withdrew, His labour done. Thus did begin 

Our various divinity and sin. 

For some to ploughshares did the metal twist, 

And others — dreaming empires — straightway cut 



348 F. W. Harvey 

Crowns for their aching foreheads. Others beat 
Long nails and heavy hammers for the feet 
Of their forgotten Lord. (Who dares to boast 
That he is guiltless?) Others coined it: most 
Did with it — simply nothing. (Here again 
Who cries his innocence?) Yet doth remain 
Metal unmarred, to each man more or less, 
Whereof to fashion perfect loveliness. 

For me, I do but bear within my hand 

(For sake of Him our Lord, now long forsaken) 

A simple bugle such as may awaken 

With one high morning note a drowsing man : 

That wheresoe'er within my motherland 

That sound may come, 'twill echo far and wide 

Like pipes of battle calling up a clan, 

Trumpeting men through beauty to God's side. 



T. P. Cameron Wilson 

"Tony" P. Cameron Wilson was born in South Devon in 
1889 and was educated at Exeter and Oxford. He wrote one 
novel besides several articles under the pseudonym Tipuca, a 
euphonic combination of the first three initials of his name. 

When the war broke out he was a teacher in a school at 
Hindhead, Surrey; and, after many months of gruelling con- 
flict, he was given a captaincy. He was killed in action by a 
machine-gun bullet March 23, 1918, at the age of 29. 



SPORTSMEN IN PARADISE 

They left the fury of the fight, 
And they were very tired. 

The gates of Heaven were open quite, 
Unguarded and unwired. 



T. P. Cameron Wilson 349 

There was no sound of any gun, 

The land was still and green; 
Wide hills lay silent in the sun, 

Blue valleys slept between. 

They saw far-off a little wood 

Stand up against the sky. 
Knee-deep in grass a great tree stood; 

Some lazy cows went by . . . 
There were some rooks sailed overhead, 

And once a church-bell pealed. 
"God! but it's England," someone said, 

"And there's a cricket-field l" 



W. /. Turner 

W. J. Turner was born in 1889 ana \ although little known 
until his appearance in Georgian Poetry 1016-17, has writ- 
ten no few delicate poems. The Hunter (1916) and The 
Dark Wind (1918) both contain many imaginative and musical 
verses. 



ROMANCE 

When I was but thirteen or so 

I went into a gold land, 
Chimborazo, Cotopaxi 

Took me by the hand. 

My father died, my brother too, 
They passed like fleeting dreams, 

I stood where Popocatapetl 
In the sunlight gleams. 



35° W. J. Turner 

I dimly heard the master's voice 
And boys far-off at play, — 

Chimborazo, Cotopaxi 
Had stolen me away. 

I walked in a great golden dream 
To and fro from school — 

Shining Popocatapetl 

The dusty streets did rule. 

I walked home with a gold dark boy 
And never a word I'd say, 

Chimborazo, Cotopaxi 

Had taken my speech away. 

I gazed entranced upon his face 
Fairer than any flower — 

O shining Popocatapetl 
It was thy magic hour : 

The houses, people, traffic seemed 
Thin fading dreams by day; 

Chimborazo, Cotopaxi, 

They had stolen my soul away! 



Francis Ledwidge 

Francis Ledwidge was born in Slane, County Meath, Ireland, 
in 1891. His brief life was fitful and romantic. He was, at 
various times, a miner, a grocer's clerk, a farmer, a scavenger, 
an experimenter in hypnotism, and, at the end, a soldier. He 
served as a lance-corporal on the Flanders front and was 
killed in July, 1917, at the age of 26 years. 

Ledwidge's poetry is rich in nature imagery; his lines are 
full of color, in the manner of Keats, and unaffectedly melo- 
dious, 



Francis Ledwidge 351 



AN EVENING IN ENGLAND 

From its blue vase the rose of evening drops; 

Upon the streams its petals float away. 

The hills all blue with distance hide their tops 

In the dim silence falling on the grey. 

A little wind said "Hush!" and shook a spray 

Heavy with May's white crop of opening bloom; 

A silent bat went dipping in the gloom. 

Night tells her rosary of stars full soon, 

They drop from out her dark hand to her knees. 

Upon a silhouette of woods, the moon 

Leans on one horn as if beseeching ease 

From all her changes which have stirred the seas. 

Across the ears of Toil, Rest throws her veil. 

I and a marsh bird only make a wail. 

Irene Rutherford McLeod 

Irene Rutherford McLeod, born August 21, 1891, has written 
three volumes of direct verse, the best of which may be found 
in Songs to Save a Soul (1915) and Before Dawn (1918). The 
latter volume is dedicated to A. de Selincourt, to whom she 
was married in 1919. 

LONE DOG 

I'm a lean dog, a keen dog, a w T ild dog, and lone; 
I'm a rough dog, a tough dog, hunting on my own; 
I'm a bad dog, a mad dog, teasing silly sheep; 
I love to sit and bay the moon, to keep fat souls from sleep. 

I'll never be a lap dog, licking dirty feet, 

A sleek dog, a meek dog, cringing for my meat, 



352 Irene Rutherford McLeod 

Not for me the fireside, the well-filled plate, 
But shut door, and sharp stone, and cuff and kick and 
hate. 

Not for me the other dogs, running by my side, 

Some have run a short while, but none of them would 

bide. 
O mine is still the lone trail, the hard trail, the best, 
Wide wind, and wild stars, and hunger of the quest! 



Richard Aldington 

Richard Aldington was born in England in 1892, and edu- 
cated at Dover College and London University. His first poems 
were published in England in 1909; Images Old and New ap- 
peared in 1915. 

Aldington and "H. D." (Hilda Doolittle, his American wife) 
are conceded to be two of the foremost Imagist poets; their 
sensitive, firm and clean-cut lines put to shame their scores of 
imitators. Aldington's War and Love (1918), is somewhat 
more regular in pattern, more humanized in its warmth. 



IMAGES 

1 
Like a gondola of green scented fruits 
Drifting along the dank canals of Venice, 
You, O exquisite one, 
Have entered into my desolate city. 

II 

The blue smoke leaps 
Like swirling clouds of birds vanishing. 
So my love leaps forth toward you, 
Vanishes and is renewed. 



Richard Aldington 353 

in 
A rose-yellow moon in a pale sky- 
When the sunset is faint vermilion 
In the mist among the tree-boughs 
Art thou to me, my beloved. 

IV 

A young beech tree on the edge of the forest 

Stands still in the evening, 

Yet shudders through all its leaves in the light air 

And seems to fear the stars — 

So are you still and so tremble. 

v 

The red deer are high on the mountain, 
They are beyond the last pine trees. 
And my desires have run with them. 

VT 

The flower which the wind has shaken 
Is soon filled again with rain ; 
So does my heart fill slowly with tears, 
O Foam-Driver, Wind-of-the-Vineyards, 
Until you return. 

Robert Nichols 

Robert Nichols was born on the Isle of Wight in 1893. His 
first volume, Invocations (1915), was published while he was 
at the front, Nichols having joined the army while he was still 
an undergraduate at Trinity College, Oxford. After serving 
one year as second lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery, he 
was incapacitated by shell shock, visiting America in 1918-19 
as a lecturer. His Ardours and Endurances (1917) is the most 
representative work of this poet, although The Flower of Flame 
(1920) shows an advance in power. 



354 Robert Nichols 



NEARER 

Nearer and ever nearer . . . 
My body, tired but tense, 
Hovers 'twixt vague pleasure 
And tremulous confidence. 

Arms to have and to use them 
And a soul to be made 
Worthy, if not worthy; 
If afraid, unafraid. 

To endure for a little, 
To endure and have done: 
Men I love about me, 
Over me the sun! 

And should at last suddenly 
Fly the speeding death, 
The four great quarters of heaven 
Receive this little breath. 



Wilfred Owen 

Wilfred Owen's biography is pitifully brief. He was born 
at Oswestry on the 18th of March, 1893, was educated at the 
Birkenhead Institute, matriculated at London University in 
1910, obtained a private tutorship in 1913 near Bordeaux and 
remained there for two years. In 1915, in spite of delicate 
health, he joined the Artist's Rifles, served in France from 1916 
to June 1917, when he was invalided home. Fourteen months 
later, he returned to the Western Front, was awarded the 
Military Cross for gallantry in October and was killed — with 
tragic irony — a week before the armistice, on November 4, 1918, 
while trying to get his men across the Sombre Canal. 



Wilfred Owen 355 

Owen's name was unknown to the world until his friend 
Siegfried Sassoon unearthed the contents of his posthumous 
volume, Poems (1920), to which Sassoon wrote the introduction. 
It was evident at once that here was one of the most important 
contributions to the literature of the War, expressed by a poet 
whose courage was only surpassed by his integrity of mind 
and his nobility of soul. The restrained passion as well as 
the pitiful outcries in Owen's poetry have a spiritual kinship 
with Sassoon's stark verses. They reflect that second stage 
of the war, when the glib patter wears thin and the easy 
patriotics have a sardonic sound in the dug-outs and trenches. 
"He never," writes Sassoon, "wrote his poems (as so many 
war-poets did) to make the effect of a personal gesture. He 
pitied others; he did not pity himself." 

It is difficult to choose among the score of Owen's compelling 
and compassionate poems. Time will undoubtedly make a 
place for lines as authentic as the magnificent "Apologia pro 
Poemate Meo," the poignant "Greater Love," the majestic dirge, 
"Anthem for Doomed Youth," among others. 



APOLOGIA PRO POEMATE MEO 

I, too, saw God through mud — 

The mud that cracked on cheeks when w T retches 

smiled. 
War brought more glory to their eyes than blood, 
And gave their laughs more glee than shakes a child. 

Merry it was to laugh there — 

Where death becomes absurd and life absurder. 
For power was on us as we slashed bones bare 
Not to feel sickness or remorse of murder. 

I, too, have dropped off fear — 

Behind the barrage, dead as my platoon, 
And sailed my spirit surging, light and clear 
Past the entanglement where hopes lay strewn; 



356 Wilfred Owen 

And witnessed exultation — 

Faces that used to curse me, scowl for scowl, 
Shine and lift up with passion of oblation, 
Seraphic for an hour, though they were foul. 

I have made fellowships — 

Untold of happy lovers in old song. 
For love is not the binding of fair lips 
With the soft silk of eyes that look and long, 

By Joy, whose ribbon slips, — 

But wound with war's hard wire whose stakes are 

strong ; 
Bound with the bandage of the arm that drips ; 
Knit in the welding of the rifle-thong. 

I have perceived much beauty 

In the hoarse oaths that kept our courage straight; 

Heard music in the silentness of duty; 

Found peace where shell-storms spouted reddest spate. 

Nevertheless, except you share 

With them in hell the sorrowful dark of hell, 
Whose world is but the trembling of a flare, 
And heaven but as the highway for a shell, 

You shall not hear their mirth: 

You shall not come to think them well content 
By any jest of mine. These men are worth 
Your tears : You are not worth their merriment. 



Wilfred Owen 357 



ANTHEM FOR DOOMED YOUTH 

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? 

Only the monstrous anger of the guns. 

Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle 
Can patter out their hasty orisons. 
No mockeries for them; no prayers nor bells, 
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, — 
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells; 
And bugles calling for them from sad shires. 

What candles may be held to speed them all? 

Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes 
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes. 

The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall; 
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds, 
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds. 



Charles Hamilton Sorley 

Charles Hamilton Sorley, who promised greater things than 
any of the younger poets, was born at Old Aberdeen in May, 
1895. He studied at Marlborough College and University 
College, Oxford. He was finishing his studies abroad and was 
on a walking-tour along the banks of the Moselle when the 
war came. Sorley returned home to receive an immediate com- 
mission in the 7th Battalion of the Suffolk Regiment. In Au- 
gust, 1915, at the age of 20, he was made a captain. On Octo- 
ber 13, 1915, he was killed in action near Hulluch. 

Sorley left but one book, Marlborough and Other Poems. The 
verse contained in it is sometimes rough but never rude. 
Restraint, tolerance, and a dignity unusual for a boy of 20, 
distinguish his poetry. 



358 Charles Hamilton Sorley 



TWO SONNETS 

i 

Saints have adored the lofty soul of you. 

Poets have whitened at your high renown. 

We stand among the many millions who 

Do hourly wait to pass your pathway down. 

You, so familiar, once were strange: we tried 

To live as of your presence unaware. 

But now in every road on every side 

We see your straight and steadfast signpost there. 

I think it like that signpost in my land 

Hoary and tall, which pointed me to go 

Upward, into the hills, on the right hand, 

Where the mists swim and the winds shriek and blow, 

A homeless land and friendless, but a land 

I did not know and that I wished to know. 

II 

Such, such is death: no triumph: no defeat: 
Only an empty pail, a slate rubbed clean, 
A merciful putting away of what has been. 

And this we know : Death is not Life effete, 

Life crushed, the broken pail. We who have seen 

So marvellous things know well the end not yet. 

Victor and vanquished are a-one in death: 
Coward and brave: friend, foe. Ghosts do not say, 
"Come, what was your record when you drew breath?" 
But a big blot has hid each yesterday 



Charles Hamilton Sorley 359 

So poor, so manifestly incomplete. 
And your bright Promise, withered long and sped, 
Is touched; stirs, rises, opens and grows sweet 
And blossoms and is you, when you are dead. 



TO GERMANY 

You are blind like us. Your hurt no man designed, 
And no man claimed the conquest of your land. 
But gropers both, through fields of thought confined, 
We stumble and we do not understand. 
You only saw your future bigly planned, 
And we the tapering paths of our own mind, 
And in each other's dearest ways we stand, 
And hiss and hate. And the blind fight the blind. 

When it is peace, then we may view again 
With new-won eyes each other's truer form 
And wonder. Grown more loving-kind and warm 
We'll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain, 
When it is peace. But until peace, the storm, 
The darkness and the thunder and the rain. 

Robert Graves 

Robert Graves was born in England of mixed Irish, Scottish 
and German stock, July 26, 1895. One of "the three rhyming 
musketeers" (the other two being the poets Siegfried Sassoon 
and Robert Nichols), he was one of the several writers who, 
roused by the war and giving himself to his country, re- 
fused to glorify warfare or chant new hymns of hate. Like 
Sassoon, Graves also reacts against the storm of fury and 
blood-lust (see his poem "To a Dead Boche"), but, fortified 
by a lighter and more whimsical spirit, where Sassoon is vio- 
lent, Graves is volatile; where Sassoon is bitter Graves is 
almost blithe. 



360 Robert Graves 

An unconquerable gayety rises from his Fairies and Fusiliers 
(1917), a surprising and healing humor that is warmly indi- 
vidual. In Country Sentiment (1919) Graves turns to a fresh 
and more serious simplicity. A buoyant fancy ripples beneath 
the most archaic of his ballads and a quaintly original turn of 
mind saves them from their own echoes. 



IT'S A QUEER TIME 

It's hard to know if you're alive or dead 

When steel and fire go roaring through your head. 

One moment you'll be crouching at your gun 
Traversing, mowing heaps down half in fun: 
The next, you choke and clutch at your right breast — 
No time to think — leave all — and off you go . . . 
To Treasure Island where the Spice winds blow, 
To lovely groves of mango, quince, and lime — 
Breathe no good-bye, but ho, for the Red West! 
It's a queer time. 

You're charging madly at them yelling "Fag!" 
When somehow something gives and your feet drag. 
You fall and strike your head; yet feel no pain 
And find . . . you're digging tunnels through the hay 
In the Big Barn, 'cause it's a rainy day. 
Oh, springy hay, and lovely beams to climb ! 
You're back in the old sailor suit again. 
It's a queer time. 

Or you'll be dozing safe in vour dug-out — 
A great roar — the trench shakes and falls about — 
You're struggling, gasping, struggling, then . . .hullo! 
Elsie comes tripping gaily down the trench, 



Robert Graves 361 

Hanky to nose — that lyddite makes a stench — 
Getting her pinafore all over grime. 
Funny! because she died ten years ago! 
It's a queer time. 

The trouble is, things happen much too quick; 
Up jump the Boches, rifles thump and click, 
You stagger, and the whole scene fades away; 
Even good Christians don't like passing straight 
From Tipperary or their Hymn of Hate 
To Alleluiah-chanting, and the chime 
Of golden harps . . . and . . . I'm not well today . . . 
It's a queer time. 

NEGLECTFUL EDWARD 

Nancy 
Edward, back from the Indian Sea, 
"What have you brought for Nancy?" 

Edward 
"A rope of pearls and a gold earring, 
And a bird of the East that will not sing. 
A carven tooth, a box with a key — " 

Nancy 
"God be praised you are back," says she, 
"Have you nothing more for your Nancy?" 

Edward 
"Long as I sailed the Indian Sea 
I gathered all for your fancy: 
Toys and silk and jewels I bring, 
And a bird of the East that will not sing: 
What more can you want, dear girl, from me?" 



362 Robert Graves 

Nancy 
"God be praised you are back," said she, 
"Have you nothing better for Nancy?" 

Edward 
"Safe and home from the Indian Sea, 
And nothing to take your fancy?" 

Nancy 
"You can keep your pearls and your gold earring, 
And your bird of the East that will not sing, 
But, Ned, have you nothing more for me 
Than heathenish gew-gaw toys?" says she, 
"Have you nothing better for Nancy?" 



I WONDER WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO 
BE DROWNED? 

Look at my knees, 

That island rising from the steamy seas! 

The candle's a tall lightship; my two hands 

Are boats and barges anchored to the sands, 

With mighty cliffs all round; 

They're full of wine and riches from far lands. . . 

/ wonder what it feels like to be drowned? 

I can make caves, 

By lifting up the island and huge waves 

And storms, and then with head and ears well under 

Blow bubbles with a monstrous roar like thunder, 

A bull-of-Bashan sound. 

The seas run high and the boats split asunder . . 

/ wonder what it feels like to be drowned? 



Robert Graves 363 

The thin soap slips 

And slithers like a shark under the ships. 

My toes are on the soap-dish — that's the effect 

Of my huge storms; an iron steamer's wrecked. 

The soap slides round and round ; 

He's biting the old sailors, I expect. . . . 

/ wonder what it feels like to be drowned? 



Louis Golding 

Louis Golding was born in Manchester in November, 1895 
and received his early education at Manchester Grammar 
School. War found him in 1914 and took him to Macedonia 
and France, where he did considerable social and educational 
work in several armies. 

On his return to England in 1919, he published his first vol- 
ume of poems, Sorrow of War y and in the same year resumed 
his career at Oxford. The succeeding collection, Shepherd 
Singing Ragtime (1921) and his remarkable novel Forward 
From Babylon (1921), appeared while he was still an under- 
graduate. 

Golding is richly gifted ; he is a realist with a romantic, 
almost a rhapsodic, vision. Anger, pity, irony, find a ringing 
if not altogether controlled voice in his prose no less than in 
his rhymes. 



PLOUGHMAN AT THE PLOUGH 

He, behind the straight plough, stands 
Stalwart; firm shafts in firm hands. 

Naught he cares for wars and naught 
For the fierce disease of thought. 



Only for the winds, the sheer 
Naked impulse of the year, 



364 Louis Golding 

Only for the soil which stares 
Clean into God's face, he cares. 

In the stark might of his deed 
There is more than art or creed; 

In his wrist more strength is hid 
Than the monstrous Pyramid; 

Stauncher than stern Everest 
Be the muscles of his breast; 

Not the Atlantic sweeps a flood 
Potent as the ploughman's blood. 

He, his horse, his ploughshare, these 
Are the only verities. 

Dawn to dusk, with God he stands, 
The Earth poised on his broad hands. 



THE SINGER OF HIGH STATE 

On hills too harsh for firs to climb, 

Where eagle dare not hatch her brood, 
On the sheer peak of Solitude, 
With anvils of black granite crude 

He beats austerities of rhyme. 

Such godlike stuff his spirit drinks, 
He made great odes of tempest there. 
The steel-winged eagle, if he dare 
To cleave these tracts of frozen air, 

Hearing such music, swoops and sinks. 



Louis Golding 365 

Stark tumults, which no tense night awes, 

Of godly love and titan hate 

Down crags of song reverberate. 

Held by the Singer of High State, 
Battalions of the midnight pause. 

On hills uplift from Space and Time, 
On the sheer peak of Solitude, 
With .stars to give his furnace food, 
On anvils of black granite crude 

He beats austerities of rhyme. 



A REFERENCE BIBLIOGRAPHY 

The following thirteen volumes deal, in considerable 
detail, with many of the poets, groups and tendencies 
considered in this collection. A few treat principally of 
the period between i860 and 1890; the majority, how- 
ever, reflect the shifting course of contemporary poetry. 
Most of the thirteen contain liberal quotations, references, 
and suggestions for supplementary reading. 

Aiken, Conrad. Scepticisms: Notes on Contemporary Poetry. 

Alfred A. Knopf. 1919. 
Boynton, Percy H. A History of American Literature. Ginn 

and Company. 1919. 
Brooks, Van Wyck. America's Coming of Age. (Chapters II 

and III.) B. W. Huebsch. 1915. 
Eastman, Max. Enjoyment of Poetry. Charles Scribner's 

Sons. 1913. 
Lowell, Amy. Tendencies in Modern American Poetry, The 

Macmillan Company. 1917. 
Lowes, John Livingston. Convention and Revolt in Poetry. 

Houghton Mifflin Company. 1919. 
Monroe, Harriet, and Alice Corbin Henderson. The New 

Poetry — An Anthology. The Macmillan Company. 1917. 
Morris, Lloyd R. The Young Idea (An Anthology of Opin- 
ion). Duffield and Company. 1917. 
Newbolt, Henry. A New Study of English Poetry. E. P. 

Dutton and Company. 1919. 
Pattee, Fred Lewis. A History of American Literature Since 

1870. The Century Company. 1915. 
Rittenhouse, Jessie B. The Younger American Poets. (1860- 

1900). Little, Brown and Company. 1904. 
Untermeyer, Louis. The New Era in American Poetry. Henry 

Holt and Company. 1919. 
Wilkinson, Marguerite. New Voices, The Macmillan Com- 
pany. 1919. 

367 



Index 



"iE," 270-272 

Abercrombie, Lascelles, 325-327 
Adams, Leonie, 211-213 
Aiken, Conrad, 195-200 
Aldington, Richard, 17, 352-353 
Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 5, 28- 
30 

Benet, Stephen Vincent, 210- 

211 
Benet, William Rose, 179-183 
Binyon, Laurence, 273-274 
Blunt, Wilfred Scawen, 229- 

230 
Bodenheim, Maxwell, 200-202 
Booth, Eva Gore, 282-283 
Branch, Anna Hempstead, 99- 

103 
Bridges, Robert, 233-234 
Brooke, Rupert, 225, 342-346 
Burton, Richard, 66-67 
Bynner, Witter, 137-140 

Campbell, Joseph, 325 
Carman, Bliss, 10, 63-66 
Carryl, Charles E., 43-45 
Carryl, Guy Wetmore, 92-96 
Cawein, Madison, 72-73 
Chesterton, G. K., 292-298 
Clark, Badger, 149-152 
Colum, Padraic, 323-324 
Conkling, Grace Hazard, 124- 

125 . 
Conkling, Hilda, 213-214 

Crane, Stephen, 85-86 

Crapsey, Adelaide, 123-124 



Daly, T. A., 87-89 
Davidson, John, 243-244 



Davies, W. H., 225, 276-279 
Deane, Anthony C, 274-276 
De la Mare, Walter, 225, 287- 

291 
Dickinson, Emily, 25-28 
Dobson, Austin, 227-229 
Dowson, Ernest, 269-270 
Drinkwater, John, 329-330 
Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 89-92 

Eastman, Max, 153-154 

Field, Eugene, 9, 48-51 
Flecker, James Elroy, 334 
Fletcher, John Gould, 17, 170- 

176 
Freeman, John, 336-337 
Frost, Robert, 14-16, 109-117 

Gibson, W. W., 224, 303-307 
Golding, Louis, 363-365 
Graves, Robert, 225, 359-363 
Guiney, Louise Imogen, 62-63 

"H. D.," 17, 176-178 
Hardy, Thomas, 230-232 
Harte, Bret, 8, 32-37 
Harvey, F. W., 347"34-8 
Hay, John, 9, 30-32 
Henley, William Ernest, 219, 

237-239 
Hinkson, Katharine Tynan, 

252-253 
Hodgson, Ralph, 225, 284-286 
Housman, A. E., 249-252 
Hovey, Richard, 10, 67-72 



Imagists, the, 17-19, 176 



369 



370 



Ind 



ex 



Johns, Orrick, 187-188 
Johnson, Lionel, 268-269 

Kemp, Harry, 152-153 
Kilmer, Aline, 191-193 
Kilmer, Joyce, 184-187 
Kipling, Rudyard, 222-223, 

258-267 
Knibbs, H. H., 20, 97-99 
Kreymborg, Alfred, 147-149 

Lang, Andrew, 232-233 
Lanier, Sidney, 9, 40-43 
Lawrence, D. H., 225, 335-336 
Ledwidge, Francis, 350-351 
Leslie, Shane, 337-338 
Lincoln, 22, 52, 78, 84, 139, 142, 

172 
Lindsay, Vachel, 20-21, 125- 

135 
Lowell, Amy, 17-19, 103-107 

Macleod, Fiona, 240-241 
Markham, Edwin, 12, 51-56 
Masefield, John, 223-224, 298- 

303 
Masters, Edgar Lee, 14, 82-85 
McCrae, John, 287 
McLeod, Irene R., 351-352 
Mew, Charlotte, 225, 310-312 
Meynell, Alice, 236-237 
Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 202- 

210 
Miller, Joaquin, 8-9, 37-39 
Monro, Harold, 312-315 
Moody, William Vaughn, 11, 

73-75 

Neihardt, John G., 136-137 
Newbolt, Henry, 226, 253-254 
Nichols, Robert, 353-354 
Noyes, Alfred, 315-323 

O'Neill, Moira, 283-284 
Oppenheim, James, 21, 140- 
H5 



O'Shaughnessy, Arthur, 235- 

236 
O'Sullivan, Seumas, 309-310 
Owen, Wilfred, 225, 354-357 

Phillips, Stephen, 272-273 
Plunkett, Joseph, 346-347 
Pound, Ezra, 17, 159-162 

Reese, Lizette Woodworth, 59- 

60 
Ridge, Lola, 145-147 
Riley, James Whitcomb, 4, 45- 

48 
Robinson, E. A., 13-14, 76-82 
Russell, George William, 270- 

272 
Russell, Irwin, 9, 56-59 

Sandburg, Carl, 16-17, 117-122 
Sassoon, Siegfried, 225, 338- 

342 
Seeger, Alan, 188-189 
Sharp, William {see Fiona 

Macleod) 
Sherman, Frank Dempster, 60- 

j2 

Sill, Edward Rowland, 8, 40 
Sorley, Charles H., 357-359 
Squire, J. C, 330-332 
Stephens, James, 225, 327-329 
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 239- 

240 
Sterling, George, 75 
Symons, Arthur, 254-255 
Synge, J. M., 220-221, 279-282 

Teasdale, Sara, 156-159 
Thomas, Edward, 308-309 
Thompson, Francis, 246-249 
Tietjens, Eunice, 154-156 
Torrence, Ridgely, 107-109 
Turner, W. J., 349-350 
Tynan, Katharine, 252-253 

Untermeyer, Jean Starr, 167- 
170 



Index 371 



Untermeyer, Louis, 162-167 Wilde, Oscar, 218, 242-243 

Wilson, T. P. C, 348-349 

Watson, William, 244-245 Wylie, Elinor, 193-195 
Wheelock, John Hall, 183-184 
Whitman, Walt, 4, 5 f 8 

Wickham, Anna, 332-333 Yeats, William Butler, 220, 

Widdemer, Margaret, 189-191 256-258 



LfyFe?8 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




013 975 108 5 



■ 



^^H 






US 












■■ 



■ 






